


the bridge that always burns behind us

by elumish



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, No Uchiha Massacre, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Time Travel Fix-It, Uchiha Massacre
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2019-10-21 15:31:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17645477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elumish/pseuds/elumish
Summary: Well, Shikamaru thinks, that didn’t go according to plan.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because I decided to continue this, more tags will be added later.

Well, Shikamaru thinks, that didn’t go according to plan.

He’s not quite sure at the moment what did happen, but this is not the body he was aiming for, not this young one with underdeveloped chakra and not nearly the musculature he’s used to. He’s not even positive where he is; it’s a grassy hill surrounded by trees, but he’s fallen asleep on dozens of grassy hills and Konoha has dozens more, so that information tells him nothing.

It’s late afternoon, given how the sun is nearly setting, and Shikamaru takes a second to dig his fingers into the soft dirt and tangled grass roots and breathe before he pushes himself upright. His heart rate is too fast, his breathing is too shallow, and his brain is sending signals to this too-young body that it doesn’t know how to handle.

He’ll take control of it. He’ll figure out it.

He always does.

He has his breathing under control by the time he reaches the bottom of the hill, his heart under control soon after that, and he knows for his own peace of mind that he will need to test his chakra control and the jutsus he knows as soon as possible. No matter what year this is, with the body he’s in right now, they’re not at war right now, but he’s…unused to peace, now.

From a cursory examination of his body as he walks, he’s in the Academy; he has the calluses that came from that, particularly from shuriken and kunai. There are particular types of calluses that come from those two weapons that he is endlessly familiar with, no matter that they’re not his main weapons of choice. 

Konoha looks different from what he remembers once he gets into the city proper, everything too tall to his too-short body because this is likely years before he hit his growth spurt, the streets bustling with civilians. The last he was in Konoha, it was a smoldering wreckage, the  Academy still on fire. This Konoha is bustling and energetic and happy, long enough, he supposes, after the Kyuubi attack that the damage has been repaired.

He’s walking down a main road when he sees Neji, when they make eye contact and Neji gives the barest nod, and Shikamaru thinks, thank god, that worked. He’s not alone. He forces himself to keep his speed steady, though, pre-genin slow as he and Neji head towards each other. It’s tempting to ask before they reach each other, but neither of them should know those hand signals.

“Commander,” Neji says when their paths intersect, pivoting and reversing direction without hesitation so he’s walking alongside Shikamaru, a solid presence to his left.

“We missed,” Shikamaru says, because no matter how obvious it is, it needs to be said.

Neji inclines his head. “We did. But yet, there may be an opportunity here.”

“We must be nearly five years from being able to enact substantive changes. Both of us are Academy students, and any hint of who we are would have us locked up and interrogated.”

“You hypothesized that, following the Kyuubi attack, the most substantive precipitating event was the massacre of the Uchiha clan.”

“I’d have thought--” Sloppy, that assumption. He had lived so long with the massacre of the Uchihas that he had forgotten what life was like prior to it, but now that he’s looking for it, he can see Uchihas around, members of the police force patrolling the streets, older women going about their shopping. “We’re before it, then?”

“Based on my confirmation of the current date, the massacre occurs tomorrow.”

Neji waits in patient silence as Shikamaru processes the implications of that, looking for all the world like a younger version of the man Shikamaru knows he is. They have no idea how to be children, he thinks amidst everything else. He can’t remember being a child, only being young and then not.

“There are three options,” Shikamaru says finally. “First, that we allow the massacre to proceed as planned.”

“We are jounin of the Leaf--”

“I am not suggesting that we do that,” Shikamaru cuts in mildly, and Neji’s mouth snaps shut. “Our second option is that we inform my father and the ANBU of the threat. Our last option is that we attempt to stop the massacre ourselves.”

“Neither of us would be able to defeat Itachi Uchiha in these bodies, not with the chakra levels or control that we have at the moment.”

Shikamaru shakes his head, pitching his voice even lower until it is barely a breath in the air. They have to be careful. “We don’t need to defeat him. We only need to stop him for long enough for an alarm to be sounded. That we are in children’s bodies may act as an advantage in this case: we are likely to be underestimated and so dismissed, allowing us some measure of surprise.”

“How do you propose we do this?” Neji asks, and it could sound dismissive, but it doesn’t.

“I will stop him,” Shikamaru says, “and you will sound the alarm.”

“Commander--”

“Shikamaru,” Shikamaru corrects gently. “I can hold him for at least a short period of time, while you would be unable to defeat him given your current body and chakra levels. And an Uchiha is more likely to be suspicious around a Hyuuga, even one as young as you, than he is to be around a Nara.”

Neji presses his lips together, disapproving, then says, “We need to confirm what our current bodies can do before we attempt this.”

“Would you be able to leave the Hyuuga compound to train tonight?”

Neji inclines his head. “Few people were concerned about how I was spending my time during this time in my life, as long as I spent an appropriate amount of time training and was proficient at the techniques I was learning.”

“Meet me at the Nara compound entrance at eight.” Shikamaru knows that his parents will allow him to train in the Nara compound, that they will be happy but not suspicious. He did train occasionally, and sometimes he even trained with Choji, so bringing in an outsider would be okay as long as he vouches for them.

And if he remembers correctly, even at that point Neji had a reputation as being a genius, and so Shikamaru reaching out to him as a relative equal would be unsurprising.

“I thank you for offering me access to your clan home,” Neji murmurs, and it is almost out of place, here and now, so much so that Shikamaru startles at it. But then he hunches his shoulders, shoves his hands in his pockets, and nods.

They have work to do.

\--

Shikamaru is weaker than he had hoped, in this body, weaker than he remembered, but he knows how time distorts perception, and there is nothing he can do about it, frankly. With more time, he could build up his reserves, but they don’t have that additional time, not if they intend to stop the massacre.

And he does intend for them to stop the massacre, no matter how much he personally hates Sasuke Uchiha, because as Neji stated, they are jounin, sworn to the Leaf and the protection of its land and its citizens, and he refuses to let his personal feelings or the weakness of his current body stop him from carrying out his duty.

So he stops them from training far before they hit the point of exhaustion, because tomorrow they will need to be at their best, and he doesn’t know the limitations of his current body, not really.

He wakes early the next morning, far earlier than young him would have, gasping from a dream he can’t quite remember, and he spends a long time staring at the ceiling, hands behind in the head.

They had plans for this, different contingency plans for ending up in different bodies--what intelligence they needed, what they could do, what they needed to affect and what that could do. This plan was the result of months of intelligence gathering and analysis, as well as nearly a month of jutsu development, but they were still not entirely sure where they would end up. It’s fiddly and unreliable, and where they ended up relied primarily on the chakra control of the people sending them back in time.

And Naruto was involved, so frankly it’s not particularly surprising that they ended up far off from where they were aiming.

He’d forgotten how boring the Academy was, but the bigger thing he had forgotten was what Sasuke had looked like before the massacre, young and happy and barely recognizable compared to the Sasuke Shikamaru remembers. He chatters about his brother, ani promising he would teach him how to throw a shuriken better, ani promising he would train with him, and it makes Shikamaru’s chest hurt.

Naruto is in his class as well, smiling whenever he thinks somebody is looking at him, and Shikamaru wants to tell him that it will get better, that he will be one of the most respected people in the village, that people love him. That Shikamaru loves him nearly like a brother. But he doesn’t know how to do that, not sitting here like this, not to a Naruto he’s barely spoken to, if ever. He doesn’t know how not to make it cruel.

So.

One problem at a time.

His memory of the exact details of the massacre is nowhere near where he would like it to be, but they had never thought they would be this far back, so they hadn’t planned for this, not really, not beyond a hypothetical discussion of what would make the most difference over a bottle of sake one night, the air smelling of too many cigarettes.

Unfortunately, that means he doesn’t know exactly when it started, but he knows it can’t have been too early; Itachi Uchiha was still at the compound to torture Sasuke, and the deaths would have been discovered before too long.

That many deaths, of people that prominent in the village, somebody would have noticed.

Shikamaru hopes.

But he can’t risk them missing it, so he and Neji both slip out during lunch to take up their position near the Uchiha entrance, close enough that they will be able to spot Itachi approaching, far enough that they shouldn’t be spotted.

Itachi Uchiha appears soon before the Academy is to let out. He looks younger than Shikamaru expected, back straight as he stares at the Uchiha compound gate, and there is a startling, dizzying moment of realization that they are all so young here, all of them. But they are shinobi, they will always be shinobi, and there is no time for such thoughts, not now, so he gestures for Neji to go, preparing himself to jump down and confront Itachi.

"Don't get yourself killed, Commander," Neji breathes, and then he's gone with barely a rustle of leaves.

Itachi starts to turn before Shikamaru hits the ground, and he has no time, no time at all, as he shapes the hand signals to the  _ kagemane no jutsu _ and then slams his eyelids shut before Itachi can catch him in a sharingan-driven genjutsu.

He feels Itachi catch in the ninjutsu, and he lowers his arms down to his sides, keeping his eyes closed and his breathing slow and even to regulate chakra flow. They estimated a range of time over which he would have to hold the jutsu so as to have Itachi restrained until his father and the ANBU could be fetched, but it was all hastily pulled together guesses, in truth, and he's not positive he can hold Itachi as long as is necessary. Not that he informed Neji of that fact, but Neji knows.

"What the fuck?" Itachi asks, and he sounds disconcertingly polite despite the words. "You're a Nara, aren't you? Commander Shikaku's kid."

"And you're Itachi Uchiha," Shikamaru says, because if he keeps up a conversation he might be able to keep Itachi from fighting him too hard. He just needs not to get distracted along the way.

"I am. Care to tell me why you're using your clan ninjutsu against me, Little Nara? If you know it, you must also know that it's not allowed to use it against allied shinobi outside of training."

Allied shinobi. What a joke. "I know about Danzo's orders," Shikamaru says in lieu of spitting at Itachi. He fights to keep his voice even, and he for the moment, he succeeds. "I know you're planning on murdering your clan and leaving Sasuke alive. I know about the coup plot."

There's a pause, like he managed to surprise Itachi, and then Itachi says, "There's no way you know that. Any of that."

"Isn't there?" Shikamaru lets out another slow breath. Itachi is fighting his shadows, he can feel it, and it's taking more chakra than he expected to keep him incapacitated. It's astonishing, the difference a few years makes in his skill and, more importantly, in his chakra levels. 

This would be simpler with his eyes open, so he could adjust more easily to whatever Itachi is doing to fight it, but the second he opens his eyes everything will be lost, and so he just needs to grit his teeth and hold on for as long as it takes. He is a jounin of Konoha, and it is his responsibility to protect the citizens of the village. Even if they're not aware of his actions, even if they don't see him as a jounin yet. He swore an oath, and he will fulfill it, or he will die trying.

"I'd really rather not kill you," Itachi says, and he even sounds like he means it, vaguely apologetic in that soft voice of his, and abruptly, viscerally, Shikamaru wants to put a kunai through his throat. He murdered his clan, he tried to kill Naruto, and he claims not to want to kill Shikamaru? How fucking dare he feign reluctance and apology after everything he's done? Everything he will do, if Shikamaru doesn't manage to keep him contained.

There's a flicker of unexpected chakra nearby, a surprise, and Shikamaru reacts before he can stop himself, his grip on the jutsu slipping as his attention is diverted.

And then he opens his eyes to a sword through his chest and spinning tomoe in bright red eyes.

\--

Shikamaru wakes slowly and in a great deal of pain, and his first thought is that there's been another attack. He can't remember who hit them or what happened, how he got injured, and he rasps out at the owner of the chakra he's in too much pain to identify next to him, "Report."

"Shikamaru?" A hand touches his forehead, a too-big head on his too small forehead, and he tries to lurch himself upright and out of the bed before he even manages to get his grit-glued eyes open. Agony hits him then, in wave after wave radiating out from his stomach, and his body fails him. The world a smear of white around him, Shikamaru writhes.

Healing jutsu is slow coming, and wrong--not a chakra that he recognizes, not Sakura's--but he doesn't have the energy or the willpower to fight against it. He can't  _ think _ , not past the pain, not around the pain.

The pain subsides, finally, and he opens his eyes to a Konoha hospital room that was destroyed months ago, a glow of green chakra around the hands of a medic he doesn't know. Beside her, his father, too young.

The time-space jutsu. Itachi Uchiha. Neji.

Shikamaru lets himself slump back on the bed, finally, relaxing against the mattress as the pain fades even more. When he manages to speak, it's to ask, "The Uchihas?"

"Alive," his father says, and he's looking at Shikamaru the way he looks as puzzles he doesn't understand but plans to soon. "Including Itachi Uchiha, who's currently imprisoned for impaling you. Along with his planned massacre of his entire clan."

Shikamaru closes his eyes. "Neji?"

"Sitting out in the hallway, waiting for you to wake up. I sent him home, but he was back twenty minutes later."

"Injuries?"

"None, other than yours." His father blinks. "And Itachi Uchiha."

"What--"

"I broke both of his arms," his father says. He sets his hand on Shikamaru's cheek. "Rest. We can talk later."

For once, Shikamaru has no interest in resting, but his body has other ideas, and he drifts back into an uneasy sleep.

When he wakes the next time, Chouji and Ino are sitting by his bedside, Chouji braiding Ino's hair the way he used to do when they were anxious and Ino was trying to distract both of them. She's the first one who notices that he's awake, lunging at him only to be yanked back by Chouji's grip on her hair. "Shikamaru," she shrieks, and then she winces at his own wince, lowering her voice to say, "You're awake."

"Water," Shikamaru croaks, the word sticking in his dry throat, and it's Chouji who snags a glass of water and presses it to Shikamaru's lips so he can sip slowly from it. "Thanks."

"What the hell?" Ino demands as soon as he's done drinking, looming over him like the only thing keeping her from attacking him is the fact that he's in a hospital bed. "You skip half of school and the next thing we hear you've been stabbed by Itachi Uchiha, and you're running around with Neji Hyuuga suddenly even though he's  _ so weird _ , what are you  _ doing _ ?"

"I," Shikamaru says. "I'm sorry."

Ino sinks back in her chair, mouth twisting. "I don't want your  _ apology _ ," she mutters. "I want to know what's happening."

"Shikamaru's dad said that he needed to talk to Shikamaru about it first," Chouji mumbles, before pulling out a bag of chips and starting to eat from it. He doesn't even look like he's enjoying the chips, and that's how Shikamaru can tell how bad he feels.

Arms crossed across her chest, Ino says, "Well, that's stupid. And we're all friends, right? And we're going to be on the same genin team, so we have to tell each other things. Teammates don't keep secrets from each other, and they don't run around with weirdos like Neji Hyuuga."

We're not teammates yet, Shikamaru thinks, and doesn't say it. Instead, he tilts his head back on his pillow and stares up at the ceiling, the ceiling that doesn't exist anymore except it does, it's here, everything here is solid, he doesn't like it, doesn't like that everything feels so real when it's all gone and he's never going back to his time. He'll never know his version of Ino or Chouji or anyone else again.

They changed the world, and now they need to live with it.

He just has to hope that they didn't make things worse.

\--

His dad is back the next time he's awake, one hand stroking Shikamaru's hair like he doesn't want to stop touching him, like he thinks that Shikamaru will vanish if he lets go for too long. But he looks somber, too, and that look of Shikamaru being a puzzle he wants to solve hasn't gone away yet.

"I need to talk to you about what happened," his father says finally, and his hand pulls away, tucking back in his lap. Perhaps he doesn't want to be touching Shikamaru for this part. Shikamaru isn't sure if he blames him. "From what I've been able to piece together and from what Hyuuga has told me, the two of you left the Academy during lunch and then confronted Itachi Uchiha, who was on his way to murder his entire clan. Hyuuga left you to find me while you used our shadow technique to immobilize a murderous ANBU until we could come. Is that correct?"

Shikamaru nods. "Yes, sir."

"Uchiha hasn't spoken much, but he said that you told him you know about not only his plans but his orders, orders he claims nobody other than the one who gave them should have known about."

Shikamaru had  known that saying that would come back to bite him, because he can't explain why he knew--they won't reveal the jutsu unless absolutely necessary, based on a few possible scenarios that this does not fall under--but given that it seems to have kept Itachi still long enough to keep the Uchihas alive, he can't bring himself to regret it. "Yes, sir."

His father's hand clenches in his lap, and in an uncharacteristically sharp voice, he snaps, "How, then? Why? What were you  _ thinking _ ?"

"I..." Shikamaru presses his lips together, thinking furiously while trying not to look like he's thinking furiously. There are few lies that will convince his father, and fewer still if his father hears them thinking that Shikamaru is planning on lying to him. "I overheard part of the conversation between Danzo Shimura and Itachi Uchiha. I was passing by, and I didn't think either of them noticed me, but I left quickly anyway, just in case. I had no proof, though, and Danzo-sama is a councilor and Itachi a respected ANBU, and so there was little I could do about it. Neji...noticed my preoccupation and approached me, and I explained my suspicions to him. We discussed the fact that the Uchihas had been increasingly isolated since the Kyuubi attack and that we had both noticed some discontent among the Uchiha, which gave credence to the argument of a potential coup. Neji had additionally heard discussions within the Hyuuga of mistrust of the Uchiha and how that could give additional power to the Hyuuga, which we thought could be part of what was bothering the Uchiha so much, that they were losing power to other clans such as the Hyuuga due to the isolation. As such, we decided to find proof, and the only means we had of doing that was stopping Itachi Uchiha.

"Also," Shikamaru says, "we didn't want to let it happen, if it was going to. We're--we're to be shinobi of Konoha, and there is a certain duty to the village and its people that comes with that."

"You're not shinobi yet," his father says, but slowly, and the doubt on his face looks more pro forma than true. "This is not a responsibility of yours, yet. But...but I had underestimated you." He touches his hand to Shikamaru's forehead again. "And I'm proud of you."

Shikamaru smiles at his father, even as his stomach churns at the thought that that pride is misplaced; Shikamaru only seems so intelligent in this case because he knew already. And because he just lied to his father, lied to his face without any intention of ever telling him the truth.

"However," his father continues, "don't think that this will keep you safe from your mother."

Shikamaru winces.

\--

Neji takes a few more days to appear, leaning against the wall of the hospital room near the door as though he's keeping guard, even as his eyes stay fixed on Shikamaru. 

"I'm not going to try to escape," Shikamaru tells him from where he's propped up in the bed. He's been healed, but there's still a lot of rebuilding his body has left to do before he can do much physical exertion. This recovery will be troublesome.

"We have no way of going home," Neji responds, because of course he's going to go straight to the heart of the matter. He's changed a lot since they were genin, but he's still a blunt asshole when he needs to be. "We have changed the path of fate, but from this point we have limited knowledge of the future, knowledge that will become more and more of a liability as time passes and events diverge from our original path."

"We'll need to be careful," Shikamaru agrees. "But we had no other choice."

"No. We didn't."

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been debating whether to keep this as a one-shot or turn it into a long story, and eventually I decided to just post it. So if you want to see a full story/continuation of this, let me know.


	2. Chapter 2

 Shikamaru hurts.

He's spent most of the last few months in some form of pain--most of the last few months of the future, his real time, the time he will never return to--but that was mostly the normal aches and pains of a shinobi, made worse by their living at war, even if he wasn't on the front lines. This pain is the sharp burn of wound recovery, overpowering and unyielding.

He was lucky, he knows; Itachi stabbed him as his father and the others arrived, so he was stabilized and treated almost immediately. It was an attempt to keep him from revealing Danzo's plan, he thinks, so even though Itachi was caught the plan wouldnt'e be revealed. He didn't account for someone else knowing about it.

He doesn't know where the investigation is, or where Itachi is, and it's more irritating than he expected, being so out of the loop when he's spent so long being intimately involved in all areas of planning and intelligence.

But he's a child here, not even a genin much less the jounin he was, and no matter his involvement they would have no reason to involve him in the investigation.

So he's left convalescing in the hospital, Ino and Chouji delivering him his homework so he doesn't fall too far behind at the Academy, because he can hardly tell them that he could pass the entire curriculum today, even in as much pain as he's in. He's fought through worse.

Neji comes every day, making sure not to cross paths with either Ino and Chouji or Shikamaru's parents, mostly standing near the doorway like he's standing guard, no matter how much Shikamaru tells him it's unnecessary.

"You made a potential enemy of Shimura-sama," Neji says quietly, "and you're injured. I'll be here until you're recovered."

Shikamaru rubs his face. "Does nobody wonder where you are?"

"No." Neji smiles wryly. "It was a point of pain, when I was a child, the degree to which I was overlooked in favor of Lady Hinata and Lady Hanabi, but now I'm finding it to my benefit."

Shikamaru can't imagine that; he's always been the only child, the heir to an old family. But he knows enough about Neji's past to imagine it. "You're changing little, then, you think?"

"Change is inevitable--change has happened. The Uchiha live." Neji shakes his head. "Rather than focusing on avoiding all change, I think we need to be strategic about the changes we seek to make, just as we were before we left. There are a lot more changes we have the opportunity to make, though each one will take us further from the world that we left behind."

That makes sense, though Shikamaru needs to restrain the instinct to change nothing other than one what they have already changed, so that they have the clearest idea of what the future will bring. But Neji is right--things have already changed too much for them to rely on their former knowledge, and it would be better for them to control what they change than for them to be dragged along by whatever happens.

"Make a list of points you think should or should not be changed," Shikamaru instructs, "and I'll do the same. Consider both what you can change and what I can, as well as those we should or should not involve."

Neji inclines his head. "Yes, Commander."

Shikamaru doesn't bother to correct him, though he'll do it if Neji does it in public. They're each holding on to their own pieces of home, and if formality is the most that Neji is clinging to, Shikamaru won't fight too hard to take that away from him.

Neji settles back into his guard position, arms at his side, looking as prepared for an attack as he can with the limited weapon access that Academy students have. It's something they're going to need to figure out, because Shikamaru is uncomfortable not having weapons on hand at all times, and Neji looks even more so.

The door opens, and Neji shifts position, but it's only Shikamaru's father, and Neji relaxes back against the wall. He looks _young_ , Shikamaru thinks suddenly, especially standing next to Shikaku. He tends to think of the two of as the adult jounin that they are, when they're alone, but in comparison they look so very young.

"Hyuuga-san," his father says, frowning at Neji. "Don't you have something better to do than wait around in my son's hospital room?"

"I'm keeping him company," Neji says, stounding obstinantly polite. "I have completed all Academy homework for the day."

His father still looks suspicious, but what he says is, "I suggest you go train, if you have nothing else to do." He looks at Shikamaru. "The Hokage wants to speak to you."

Shikamaru isn't surprised that he's been ordered to report; frankly he's more surprised he wasn't called in earlier. But he is a child, here, not a shinobi; he wouldn't be expected to do a standard report.

With a hand pressed against his chest as it screams at him, Shikamaru gingerly levers himself out of the bed. Neji looks like he wants to help, but he lets Shikaku be the one to step forward and wrap an arm around him to keep him upright.

Being this weak is so troublesome, and Shikamaru has the half-structured thought of Lady Tsunade healing him better than whoever's been working on him has. But most of this will just take rest and more healing, and gratitude for the fact that Itachi managed to miss every vital organ on his way through Shikamaru's chest.

"After this meeting you'll be coming home," his father tells him as they walk. "You'll be restarting the Academy at the beginning of next week, though you'll only be doing book work until you've been medically cleared to begin training." He glances at Shikamaru. "You will have to work harder to keep from being forced to repeat the year, given the amount of physical training you will miss. No slacking, no sleeping through class, doing your work no matter how troublesome it is."

Shikamaru doesn't really want to do that--he's been the Academy once before and it was boring enough the first time--but he refuses to repeat a year and have to do it a _third_ time, so he'll put in the necessary effort. Though hopefully it should be far less work this time, because he already knows all of it.

The biggest trouble witll be waiting for medical clearance, because he wants to get up to fighting form as quickly as he can, but he'll train with Neji if he can't train with anyone else. And there is some training he can do without moving, especially his shadow techniques. One reason it's a traditional Nara technique; it's the laziest and most stationary technique in the village.

Shikamaru doesn't recognize one of the guards on Hokage duty, which reminds him that he needs to relearn Konoha as it is right now. There are two ANBU on guard as well, Crow and Hound if he's not mistaken; he's more certain about Hound's chakra, given the amount of time he's spent with Hatake Kakashi.

The Hokage is sitting behind his desk when they walk in, and Shikamaru nearly stumbles at the realization that it's _Sandaime-sama_ , that Sandaime-sama is still alive here, that Lady Tsunade is who knows where, gambling and drinking her life away. 

But this is a surprise he can't show, so he forces himself down as one knee as one does to make a report, igoring the pain that sends through his chest, and says, "Hokage-sama."

"Nara Shikamaru. You may stand for this, given your injury."

Standing is harder than it sounds, and Shikamaru ends up clutching one hand to his chest, fingers curled around his shirt as he tries to keep from making a sound at the bolts of agony going through his rib cage. By the time he's on his feet he's panting softly, and his father wraps an arm around him to keep him upright.

"Why did you stop Uchiha Itachi outside of his clan compound?"

"I had heard part of the conversation between Uchiha-san and Shimura-sama, enough to know that Uchiha-san was planning on killing the entirety of his clan." Other than Sasuke, but Shikamaru isn't sure if it makes sense to mention that right now.

"What of the timing; how were you certain that that was the time in which he was planning on committing the massacre?"

"We weren't sure of the exact timing so we staked out the outside of the clan property when possible."

"But the day of the massacre you left the Academy early."

Shikamaru swallows, his throat dryer than he would like.  They were so focused on stopping the massacre that they hadn't planned sufficiently for the aftermath, an uncharacteristicaly sloppy move on his part. THe most important thing is that htey be not only believably but consistent; there can't be more suspicions than necessary that either of them are lying.

Some suspicion is inevitable, but too much will make their position in the village untenable.

"I had a feeling," Shikamaru says finally. "Given that a coup was being planned, Itachi would need to move quickly, and the hour on either side of the Academy letting out is one of the most in-flux times for the village. That would make it easier for him to catch people unawares."

Sandaime-sama examines him for a bit without saying anything, but then he nods, taking a puff from his pipe. Shikamaru's not sure if that means he believes him--he doesn't remember the man well enough to know his tells--but it seems better than an alternative response. 

After a moment of puffing on his pipe and watching Shikamaru, Sandaime-sama asks, "Why did you think you would be capable of stopping Uchiha Itachi?"

"I didn't," Shikamaru admits, and there's a sharp, quickly stifled inhale from his father. "My hope was to hold him off long enough for Neji to reach my father, and that even if I didn't manage to stop him entirely, it would buy enough time that there would be minimal casualties before he could be stopped." Neji doesn't know about that latter part, though he's likely guessed. An a split-second decision, Shikamaru decides for further honesty. "I thought my life would be worth giving up, if it saved the Uchihas. Because we're all of Konoha, and if I'm going to be a shinobi, it'll be my job to do that anyway."

"I see," Sandaime-sama says, and then, to Shikamaru's shock, he adds, "You did Konoha proud."

Shikamaru bows his head so nobody can see whatever is on his face at the moment. "Thank you, Hokage-sama."

"Now," Sandaime-sama says, clapping his hands together, "how is your recovery going?"

"Well, I believe," Shikamaru answers.

"Shikaku?"

"He's still in pain," Shikamaru's father says, "but he's doing well to work through it. The medics think it should be a couple weeks before he'll be cleared for light training."

Sandaime-sama nods, taking another puff from his pipe. He looks so old, Shikamaru thinks, older than Shikamaru ever realized as a child. He had simply been eternal, the only Hokage Shikamaru had ever known until the moment he died. He would live forever, Shikamaru had thought.

But the attack is still years away. This have time to change things.

\--

Shikamaru expects Neji's visits to stop or at least taper off once he's moved from the hospital to his home, but the next day, soon after the Academy lets out, his mother bursts into his room and tells him that the Hyuuga kid has come to visit and that Shikamaru should drag himself out of his room to come see him.

His chest is hurting less now, so he stands and heads out to where Neji is waiting just inside the entranceway, head bowed as he examines the slippers he's wearing. 

"We're going out to the grounds," Shikamaru tells his mother.

"No training," she reminds him, as though he's about to forget with his chest screaming at him every time he moves too suddenly, but then she shoos them both off.

Shikamaru lies down on the soft grass of their clan grounds, once they're out there, and Neji sits down next to him, and both of them take a moment to check to see if anyone is within earshot before they start talking.

"Did Sandaime-sama talk to you?" Shikamaru asks when they're certain they're alone.

Neji nods. "I told him that the plan was for you to hold Itachi still while I get help."

"And the timing?"

"Your plan." When Shikamaru glances over at him, he adds, "I figured you'd have an answer, and conflicting information would be worse than me not saying anything."

Good thinking on Neji's part. "We're going to need to figure out a training regiment. I don't really want to," Shikamaru admits, "but I want even less to spend this long out of fighting form."

"We can train," Neji says, "once you're recovred. I'll be working on the Hyuuga techniques in the meantime, to regain that part of my chakra control. I have the knowledge, but this body is lacking in the fine muscle control necessary to carry it out."

"Chakra levels are the other main limiting factor at the moment. Yours have always been higher than mine, but I may be able to increase my base level by beginning training specifically for that from a younger age." Shikamaru was too lazy as a child, untroubled by the war he had known intellectually was inevitable. He won't make that same mistake again.

"Taijutsu will need to be trained from nearly the basics as well, but much of that can wait the few weeks until you are more recovered."

Shikamaru stares up at the clouds. He wants a cigarette, in that distant way that has more to do with habit and having something to do with his hands than a nicotine craving that this body hasn't developed yet. "Your list of what we should seek to change--"

"Will be completed in the next few days. I'll have a preliminary list to present by next week."

Shikamaru has some of his own ideas floating around in his head, but tonight or tomorrow he'll sit down and write it all out.

"Be careful not to let it be seen."

"Of course. I will--"

" _Shikamaru_."

Shikamaru bolts upright at the sound of his mother's shout, then doubles over, clutching at his chest as pain bursts through it. Motherfucker, that hurts, and he's not going to do that again any time soon.

He has the momentary thought that there is an attack, and Neji clearly has the same thought, because he tilts his head to the side, then says, "There's one other chakra. An Uchiha, I think."

Shikamaru can feel that there's no fighting, or even hostility, but this body isn't trained enough to do a more specific check than that. But his mother will got mad at him if he takes too much time, so he levers himself upright, one arm wrapped around his chest, and starts towards house, Neji following next to him.

He walks towards the house, because running jars his chest too much at the moment, and even like this he has to focus on his breathing, on keeping himself steady. Being injured like this, especially in this week untrained body, is so troublesome.

When they get inside, his mother is sitting with a woman who is definitely an Uchiha, though Shikamaru can't identify her on sight. She stands when they walk in.

"Shikamaru," his mother says, "this is Uchiha Mikoto."

Sasuke and Itachi's mother, and the wife of the clan-head. Shikamaru bows deeply, breathing through the pain in his chest, and he can see Neji bowing next to him. And then Neji says, "I'll see you tomorrow," and slips out of the room, leaving Shikmaru alone with his mother and Uchiha Mikoto.

"I've asked to speak with you alone," Mikoto says.

"I'll give the two of you some time," Shikamaru's mother says, touching Shikamaru's shoulder before leaving the room. She closes the door behind her.

Shikamaru eases down onto the nearest zabuton, and Mikoto sits back down on her own, and for a moment they watch each other.

"I'm here because I want to thank you," Mikoto says, "and apologize."

Shikamaru shifts, uncomfortable. "That's not--"

"Please," she cuts in, and he falls silent. "You saved my family, my clan, and you did so at great risk to yourself. At great cost to yourself, given by the amount of pain you're clearly still in. And you did so not even as a genin yet, as just an Academy student. You saved me and my husband, and you saved Itachi, because if he had succeeded, or even tried, he would have been hunted and killed by members of this village. Thank you."

Mikoto stands, walking around the table to stand in front of him. And then, to his surprise, she kneels and performs a saikeirei, her untied hair brushing the tatami mat beside her forehead.

Shikamaru bites his lip and doesn't say anything.

She straightens upright again, meeting his eye. "Now I must big your forgiveness for the actions of my son. Though we were the ones he intended to kill, you were ultimately his only victim. For him to harm a member of the village in such a way brings shame to our clan and our family, and I apologize for his actions."

With that, she bows again, forehead pressed against the floor, and his heartbeat pounds in his head as her bow seems to go on and on.

When she finally rises, he says, "I forgive you. And I forgive Itachi, for stabbing me." They had been enemy shinobi in that moment, and you don't blame an enemy shinobi for trying to kill you.

It's everything else that he can't forgive Itachi for.

"You will always have an ally in the Uchiha." Mikoto stands, returning to her seat. "We owe you a debt that can never truly be paid."

Shikamaru won't discount that lightly; despite their current standing in the village, the Uchiha are a powerful clan.

He has the brief thought of wondering why she isn't speaking to Neji as well, but then he thinks: politics. The Uchiha can't be seen as being indebted to the Hyuuga, but the Nara are both neutral and respected by the village. 

Shikamaru takes in a breath, then says, "A coup attempt will fail, and a successful coup attempt would tear apart the village. The Hyuuga would never stand with you, among others."

Mikoto doesn't look surprised that he knows about the coup planning, but he doesn't know how much of that is her own poise and self-control. "Much has been reconsidered since Itachi's actions," is all she says.

"Shimura Danzo-sama--"

"Much has been reconsidered," she repeats. She stands, and he stands as well. She smiles. "I hope you will not change how you treat Sasuke, based on what Itachi has done."

Shikamaru had genuinely not considered doing that; he knows that Sasuke would have been the final victim of Itachi's work. But he's a child here, he remembers abruptly, and that is the sort of thing that a child would do. Or something that someone who didn't have the information he might have would do.

"I won't," he says, and immediately thinks, maybe that means I'm not allowed to hate Sasuke here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I am continuing this, it turns out. If I can manage to get through it (always a question) I have a feeling it might end up quite long, but we'll see.


	3. Chapter 3

 It’s a few days before Shikamaru has a chance to sit down and write out his list of what they should consider changing. He needs to be careful with this sort of information, even more so now that his father is watching him so closely, and so discretion trumps speed in this case.

He spends that morning training his ninjutsu, sitting cross-legged on the tatami mat floor of his bedroom and reaching out with his shadows to catch what he can, spreading them further and further each time, holding them longer and longer. It’s not as useful an application as practicing on moving targets, but it’s good chakra practice nonetheless, and he needs to build up his reserves as quickly as he can without burning his chakra pathways out.

He won’t ever be as helpless here as he felt during the invasion, not if he can help it.

After dinner and a game of shogi with his father that he loses by less than he probably should—he can’t remember how to play badly, or badly enough, not and make it look natural—he takes that same seat on his floor, scroll spread out in front of him, and starts to write.

 _The invasion_ , he writes first, and then, _Orochimaru_. He has some idea of where Orochimaru is now and what he’s doing, but not nearly enough, not in any specific detail, because the _village_ hadn’t known at that time, and after they had known how much of a threat he was, they were more focused on future intelligence than looking backwards.

With the Uchiha still around, the village’s defenses will be stronger, and they will be more able to weather an attack of that magnitude; their massacre had decimated the police forces and killed all of its upper leadership, leaving it weak and ineffective for years to come. But better still would be to prevent the invasion from happening in the first place, which would require preventing its planning, which would require preventing Orochimaru from connecting in such a way with Suna. Forming stronger ties to Suna, then, or stopping Orochimaru.

Shikamaru isn’t sure which is a better option at the moment, and either way, he’s not sure what he or Neji will be able to do about it. They’re just children here, children without the political pull either of them had as respected jounin.

 _Naruto_ , he writes next, because he refuses to watch one of the heroes of the village, a war orphan and the son of a Hokage, his _friend_ , suffer and be reviled the way he is now, ignorant of who he is and where he came from. Untrained.

He doesn’t want to make Naruto a weapon, but he can’t help thinking having Naruto be strong from the start would be a great asset to the village. He’s not sure why they didn’t care as much about that the first time, other than irrational hatred and fear.

Next he writes _Gaara?_ and then crosses it out and then writes it again. The Kazekage is a great ally to Konoha, but that is because of Naruto, and Shikamaru doesn’t know how much he can do to shape that on his own, or at all.

After that comes _Danzo_ and then _Root_ , and they should be first, perhaps, but some part of him doesn’t want to think about them, the cancers within their village. He wants to rip them out and burn them down until they’re just ashes.

Danzo took children. He used children and he discarded them, civilian children, clan children, war orphans. Those he had sworn to protect, those the village existed to protect, and there are few people Shikamaru hates so much as oath breakers.

And on a pragmatic level, especially now, Danzo stands as the greatest threat to the village, and taking him out will allow greater ease of movement on all fronts.

Though he doesn’t write it down, Shikamaru plans to find out Itachi’s status and the status of the planned coup. Stopping the massacre didn’t stop the plan, though from his meeting with Uchiha Mikoto, he thinks she might have.

She’ll be one to watch, here. He knows more about the clan head, though admittedly not as much as he should, given that Uchiha Fugaku died before Shikamaru had a strong awareness of clan politics.

Lastly comes _Akatsuki_ , and that's the most important, in some ways, but it should be what they have the most time to figure out, and it's also what he has the least idea of what they can do to impact it. It'll take far more planning than he has time to do now, and he'll need Neji's opinions as well. He has some thoughts now, but nothing settled enough to be of any particular use.

He's tempted to make make Hidan his first priority, to kill him before he can kill Asuma, but that's not a good move. He has no particular strategic value in taking down Akatsuki, no matter how much Shikamaru wants to kill the son of a bitch himself.

Shikamaru is also, unfortunately nine. Plus or minus. He doesn't actually remember how old he is at this point, though that's something he should ask Neji about. No point in freaking his parents out by asking them how old he is, especially because it's not essentially knowledge at the moment. 

Before going to bed, he seals the paper in a scroll, setting it in a desk drawer that he locks with another seal. He'll tell his parents he's practicing his sealwork, if they ask, but chances are, they won't ask.

It's an odd mix of autonomy and dependence, what he has here at this age with his parents. They expect him not to talk about anything, but they also expect to know where he is at all times and who he's with, and to be back by certain times. He hasn't been ansurable to anybody to this degree in years, and it's confining in a way he's not too fond of, no matter how much he loves his parents.

Neji comes the next day with small scroll in one pocket, and they sit outside like they've been doing a lot. It's the best way for them not to be overheard. The only way to guarantee it, given that his mother is always home. She retired from service when pregnant with him, but she still has the instincts of the chunin she was. 

Neji sets the scroll down on the grass, but he doesn't open it, not yet. Instead, he says, "Lady Hinata. I know that she was shaped by her experiences with Naruto, but I can't--I can't treat her the way I treated her as a child. I've been avoiding her since our return, but..." He presses his lips together, looking away like he's ashamed. "I can't. I respect her now, and she is my family, and I will not treat her the way I did before.

He says it like he expects Shikamaru to disagree with him, like he's begging forgiveness for some insubordination, but now that Shikamaru is thinking about it, he couldn't have expected Neji to treat Hinata with the disdain and cruelty he treated her with as a child.

So Shikamaru nods and gives a perfunctoral, "Okay."

Neji shoots him a startled glance. "I know making changes limits how useful our knowledge is--"

"We've already made a far bigger change than you treating your cousin with respect. There is no shame in being kind to Hinata. To being kind to a child."

"I--thank you." Neji lets out a slow breath. "Thank you."

"On that note, though--we need to do something about Naruto. The abuse he suffers at the hands of the village, I won't stand for that."

"His kindness, though, his strength, that comes out of what he suffered. Without that--"

"No," Shikamaru snaps, and then his chest burns with pain and he presses a hand to it, trying to breathe. When he's calmer, he repeats, "No. No, I won't allow Naruto to be treated this way again. We were _lucky_  that Naruto turned out the way he did, but there was no guarantee. Things have changed. There still is no guarantee. But even if there was, I will not stand to see the greatest man I know being a pariah, for the sole crime of being the jinchuuriki to the kyuubi. Or if that's not a good enough reason for you, I won't stand for a war orphan, for the son of the Yondaime, to be abused by the village both of his parents sacrificed themselves to protect. We do not do that in Konoha. We are better than that. And both of us are sworn jounin of this village, and we will leave up to the vows we swore. Do you understand?"

"Yes." Neji lowers his head. "My apologies. How do you suggest we implement those change?"

Shikamaru flops down onto the grass, staring up at the clouds. "I have some thoughts."

\--

Shikamaru returns to the Academy the next week, though he's on light training for at least a week until his chest is healed. That means no sparring, limited taijutsu; he can practice with kunai and shuriken, but not much else.

Which, honestly, he's fine with. He doesn't really want to spar with his classmates, and his chest does still hurt, and the whole system is troublesome. The more time he can spend during the Academy sleeping, the more it'll make up for the fact that he's barely managing a couple of REM cycles of night before the nightmares get too bad.

He doesn't know what Neji is dreaming of, if anything. He hasn't asked, and Neji hasn't volunteered.

"I'm so glad you're back," Ino says, leaning against Shikamaru's desk. "Now I don't have to keep dropping off homework you're _not doing_."

"It's too troublesome."

Choji laughs, then stuff some chips in his mouth when Ino turns a glare his way. "I see," she says in a tone that clearly aims for haughty. "Well, if that's how you feel, I'll leave you alone."

She flounces off towards Sakura, who she's still friends with at this point--their obsession with Sasuke really kicked off after the massacre, if Shikamaru remembers right. He wonders if that means it'll never really happen, but then he remembers he doesn't really care.

"You should do some of your homework," Choji mutters around a mouthful of chips, "or you're going to fail, and then Ino and I are going to be stuck on a team with someone else." He glances around the room. "What if they stick us with Mina?"

"Mina won't pass," Shikamaru says, and he doesn't even feel bad about revealing that part of the future, because it's already obvious that Mina is in no way qualified to be a shinobi. She ended up working at her parents' weapon shop after failing the entrance exam.

Shikamaru thinks she might have died in the invasion, but he's not actually sure about that.

"Yeah," Choji mumbles. "Anyway. Don't fail."

"I won't." Shikamaru had been calculating the grade required to pass since he first started at the Academy, and completing the bare minimum amount of work to get there. It's a time-honored Nara tradition, which is the only reason his mother hasn't killed him for it yet.

He's ready to settle back into a nap when the door opens and Naruto bounds in, smile on his face, jumpsuit that same bright orange, and Shikamaru sits up, smiles, and says, "Hey, Naruto."

Everything...freezes, for a second, and then Naruto hurries over, a mess of uncoordinated limbs and too much energy, to perch near Shikamaru, exclaiming. "Hey, you're back! I heard Sasuke's brother stabbed you."

"I'm fine," Shikamaru says, because he doesn't really want to get into that mess in the middle of the Academy classroom, or with this young Naruto. "I missed a lot of work. Do you want to go over some of it with me?"

Chouji's bag of chips drops on the desk in front of him, and then he hurriedly picks it back up and goes back to shovelling them in his mouth with Shikamaru glances at him. He's a little red.

"Sure!" Naruto shouts. "I don't always get the homework, but we can figure it out! Believe it!"

"Great." Shikamaru glances at Chouji. "Tonight at my place work for you, Chouji?"

"I--" Chouji blinks at him, and Shikamaru realizes Chouji had thought the invitation didn't extend to him. The Chouji from Shikamaru's time wouldn't have made that mistake, but the Shikamaru of this time wouldn't have, either. But Chouji just nods. "Sure. But only if there's dinner."

Naruto perks up, then droops a bit. "I'll leave before--"

"We're having curry, I think," Shikamaru says, like he hasn't heard Naruto say anything. "I hope you like it spicy, because my mom has never figured out how to make it any way else."

Naruto opens his mouth, then closes it and swallows. "Yeah," he says finally, and the brightness sounds a little forced. "Yeah, curry sounds great."

Iruka comes in then, and everyone turns around to look with him, and Naruto finds a seat, and everyone is taking out notebooks when Chouji whispers, "Shikamaru, why--"

"I'm going to sleep," Shikamaru says, and then puts his head down and doesn't.

\--

Naruto, Shikamaru is remembering, is an idiot.

He seems to have no concept of anything from the homework; he has no idea what chakra is, and if he's sat still in his life, Shikamaru doesn't know when. It makes Shikamaru wonder how the hell Naruto ever became a shinobi, except he knows, because Naruto is the most stubborn, principled person Shikamaru has ever met, and he never gives up, not even when he should.

There's something else going on here.

“Naruto,” Shikamaru says, “do you know how to read?”

“Nope,” Naruto says cheerfully, turning the page again to stare at the next picture. “I can read some kanji, because we learned that at the Academy, and I know how to read my name. But I'm good at learning from pictures, believe it.”

“Troublesome,” Shikamaru mutters, even as his mind is whirling. Iruka-sensei must have taught him how to read, but that had to have happened after now. It really is no surprised that Naruto is the dead last, with nobody at home to even teach him to read, much less help him with anything else.

“What about your guardians?” Chouji asks, sounding horrified. “Didn't they teach you how to read?”

“Don't got no guardians. The old man stops by sometimes, and the masky people are always around, but they don't actually come inside my apartment. I think they're just everywhere,” Naruto says with the naivety of someone who doesn't realize he's the village's most powerful weapon and biggest nightmare. “They're around all the time.”

“Masky people?” Chouji whispers incredulously.

“ANBU,” Shikamaru mutters, because he knows the ANBU have been watching Naruto his entire life.

A hand drops out of Chouji's hand, falling on the table. He doesn't seem to notice. “Why are the _ANBU_ following Naruto around?”

“What do you mean following me around?” Naruto demands. “Who's following me around?”

Now is not the time that Shikamaru was planning to explain that to Naruto--especially because Shikamaru doesn't actually have any reason here to know why that's happening--but it doesn't matter, because Naruto pops up, announces, “I have to poop,” and hurries away.

As soon as he's out of earshot, Chouji turns to Shikamaru, asking, “What's going on?”

“Do you trust me?”

Chouji nods. “Yeah, of course.”

“Then trust me when I say I'll explain everything later. It's better for everyone if you don't know yet.”

Chouji bites the inside of his cheek, then says, “Yeah, okay,” and goes back to eating.

Naruto seems to have forgotten about the ANBU by the time he gets back from the toilet, and during dinner he attacks Shikamaru's mom's curry with a fervor it frankly doesn't deserve, apparently oblivious to the looks Shikamaru's parents are exchanging.

Soon before they're done, Shikamaru thinks _now_ and says, in the most casual voice he can muster, “Hey, Naruto. Have you ever seen a picture of the Yondaime?”

Shikamaru's dad goes rigid.

“The last stone face?” Naruto asks around a mouthful of curry. “I drew whiskers on his face once, if that counts.”

“Shikamaru--”

“He looks a lot like you,” Shikamaru says, blithely talking over his father. He's going to get this out, and fuck the rules. The way the village treats Naruto is despicable, and he's not going to stand for it.

“Huh,” Naruto says, and eats another mouthful of curry.

\--

Shikamaru's father finds him after Naruto is gone; Shikamaru is sitting in front of the shogi board, fiddling with the King tile.

“I understand the impulse,” his father says, “but that information--”

“I can't be faulted for disclosing a secret I don't know is a secret,” Shikamaru cuts in, before he hears something he can't pretend not to hear. “Besides, it's not that hard to figure out, if you look.” He'd had his suspicions even as a child, though he hadn't put it all together until later.

His father stares at him, then sprawls down on the floor across the shogi board from him and starts to set it up. “Explain.”

“He looks remarkably like the Yondaime. There have only been a few Uzumaki who settled in Konoha, and people know who the Yondaime's wife was. He's so neglected he doesn't know how to read, but the ANBU follow them around everywhere. He calls them masky people,” Shikamaru adds, “when every shinobi child grows up on stories of the ANBU, enough to know who they are on sight if not by description. And anyone who looks a little can find the date he was born, and the date the Yondaime died, and do the math.”

One plus one equals kyuubi, in this case.

“What I don't get is, why this facade at all? The civilians clearly all know, as do the adults, and virtually the only person at this point who has no idea what's going on is Naruto himself.”

His father is pale, and Shikamaru sees him swallow before he says, “What you're talking about is an s-class secret.”

“I'm not talking about anything.” Shikamaru places the King piece back on the board. “I just told Naruto he looks remarkably like a dead man.”

“You've changed, since the incident.”

Now Shikamaru has to be careful. “Mostly I think I started caring. If that could happen--if all that could happen in our village, with nobody noticing--what else could be going on.” Shikamaru rubs the bridge of his nose. “Frankly, I'd rather not need to be stabbed again. That was really troublesome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering how someone can know kanji without knowing hiragana, consider that Naruto fans likely know that 風 means wind or 火 means fire but can't read かぜ or ひ. You can learn how to recognize/identify kanji without knowing how to pronounce them (or what the corresponding hiragana are, if you're not literate in hiragana).


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Neji!

 Neji has seen little of Lady Hinata--or, indeed, most of his family--since his arrival from the future. There are always Hyuugas around, of course, but he is in an uncomfortable position in the hierarchy of the family, close enough to the main family that his father was the current Head's younger brother, but definitively in a side branch. With no parents, he is ostensibly cared for by the collective of Hyuuga women who no longer go on missions, but by the very fact of there being a collective, it is easy for him to slip through the cracks.

Once he has Shikamaru's permission, though, he seeks out Lady Hinata, finding her in one of the hallways of the compound; she looks so young, here, and is so clearly uncomfortable around him that it makes him ache, because he has done this to her. It is not solely his fault, but he did much damage to her confidence and self-esteem with his cruelty.

Hopefully he can reverse some of that damage now, before it is too far for him to fix.

"Neji-nii-san," Hinata says, startled and obviously nervous, ducking out of his way.

"Lady Hinata." Neji bows slightly. "Would you do me the honor of training with me?"

Hinata visibly startles, blinking at him. "You want to train with me?" she asks. "Hanabi is--I am far behind where you are, Neji-nii-san. I would not be a suitable partner for you to train with."

"On the contrary," Neji says, "if you are behind it simply means you must practice more, and that I would be an ideal partner for you to train with."

Hinata blinks at him, and Neji realizes he's forgotten to speak like his age again; he so rarely speaks to anyone other than Shikamaru, here, that he has little experience talking like a child. But there's not much he can do about it at the moment other than wait.

And the waiting pay off, because after a moment, Hinata nods, keeping her head ducked so her hair falls in front of her eyes. He'll train her out of that, and out of her fear.

He wants her to remain the heir, this time. That han't been rescinded yet, and he's determined for it never to be.

There are a few dojos in the Hyuuga compound, and normally Hinata would train in the main branch one, but Neji leads her to one of the branch family dojos so there's less chance of her father or Lady Hanabi interrupting them.

He chose this one specifically because he knew it would be empty, so there is as little pressure on Lady Hinata as possible to begin with. They each change into gi in the changing rooms near the dojo; there is a room for men and a room for women, maintained by some of the lower-ranking Hyuuga. They both bow and strip off their house slippers before entering the dojo.

Before they do anything else, the two perform the _soji_ , then kneel in seiza and bow.

"Let's do the basic Academy stretches," Neji says once they've completed what they're doing, "and then we can move on to the Hyuuga family katas."

Hinata hesitates, but only for a moment, and then she takes her stance, and they begin.

Hinata, Neji sees immediately, has a relatively correct form, as correct as is possible from a child as young as her, but every movement, every strike, is hesitant. She commits to the stretches, but it's as though she doesn't want to make herself larger than she is, as though she thinks that nobody will notice her if she doesn't move too much.

Once they're through a first set of the first three Hyuuga family katas, Neji calls them to a halt, walking around to stand in front of Hinata. Immediately, she ducks her head, looking away from him.

“Why do you want to be a shinobi?” Neji asks.

Hinata looks down at her hands, which are trembling a little. Another thing he has to train her out of. “The Hyuuga--”

“There are Hyuuga who don't become shinobi.” The 'blind’ Hyuuga mostly--ones who never develop their Byakugan. “Why do _you_ want to be a shinobi?”

“I…” Neji waits, and after some time Hinata looks up at him, and there's something in her eyes that makes him think of the old Lady Hinata, the one he knew. “I want to protect the clan, and the village, and--and those who rely on us.”

“Then remember that with every strike, you are doing what you have set out to do, and if you hold back, you will put yourself and your teammates and the mission at stake.” He reaches out to tap her fist. “This is what we use to defend those precious to us. We rely on our eyes, but we use our fists.”

Hinata presses her lips together, looking back down at the floor. “But I don't want to hurt you, Neji-nii-san, or Na--any of my classmates.”

“You'll learn enough control to spar without doing serious damage, but for right now, there's little you can do to harm me, and if I think you're about to, I'll stop you, or your teacher will, at the Academy. But if the first person you strike for real is an enemy, you will lose, and it might kill you.”

At first, Neji thinks she might not accept what he's saying, that it's too much and she's still too young, but then she gives him a decisive nod, lifting her head back up. When she settles back into her stance, her shoulders are lower, and she's settled in a way he hasn't seen from this version of her before.

"Another round of kata, then," Neji says, retaking his place, "and then we'll spar."

\--

It's the fifth time that they're sparring, two weeks later, when a lower branch member slides the door of the dojo open and says, "Hiashi-sama wishes to see you."

Neji completes his set of strikes, and then they both stop and bow to each other. Both of them are breathing hard, because they've been sparring for nearly an hour, and Neji's body has nowhere near the endurance he would like, no matter his training with Shikamaru, and there is sweat dripping down Neji's back.

"I will be there in a moment," Hinata says, wiping sweat from her own brow as she turns to look at Atsushi, who is kneeling in the entranceway to the dojo.

"Ah--" Atsushi glances away, then says, "Apologies, Hinata-sama, but it is Neji-san's presence that has been requested."

Neji isn't sure what Hiashi-sama could want him for; if he's learned of Neji sparring with Hinata, he would likely want both of them. Perhaps he has concerns about Neji training with Shikamaru, though he's not sure what the concern would be with that.

"I need a few minutes," Neji says, already striding towards the dojo exit.

"I'll take care of the _soji_ , Neji-nii-san," Hinata says quietly. "I wish to practice more."

Neji turns and nods to her before bowing to the dojo and exiting. He hurries to change, leaving the dirty gi folded in the basket of laundry in the changing room. He's still covered in sweat, but there's no helping that if he doesn't want to force Hiashi-sama to wait even longer.

Atsushi leads him to the formal receiving room of the main house, which is usually used for receiving other clan heads, and Neji hurriedly braids his hair into something less bedraggled than the sweaty mess it is right now, tying it off behind his back just before Atsushi slides opens the shoji.

Inside the room is no only Hiashi-sama but also Yamanaka Inoichi, Captain of Konoha's T&I division, and Neji is suddenly pretty sure this has nothing to do with him training with Shikamaru.

"Apologies for my tardiness," Neji murmurs, bowing to Inoichi and then to Hiashi-sama.

When he straightens, Hiashi-sama is examining him, and when Neji meets his eye, he asks, "Were you training?"

"I was sparring with Hinata-sama," Neji explains.

Hiashi-sama looks like he wants to say more, but instead he defers to Inoichi, who says, "I'm here to request permission to view your memories of the incident with Uchiha Itachi as part of our investigation into his actions and any other coconspirators that may be involved."

Danzo. They must be investigating Danzo.

Or at least Neji hopes they're investigating Danzo, and he needs to maintain at least some hope in Konoha's system despite their inability to catch a coup being planned or a massacre before it could be carried out.

"And as I have made clear," Hiashi-sama says, "I will not allow you to needlessly invade the mind of a member of my clan, my own nephew, particularly when he is not being accused of anything. To do so would set a dangerous precedent. I will not allow it."

Inoichi looks at Neji. "Neji, you can agree to this on your own."

" _No_ ," Hiashi-sama says sharply, " _he can't_. He is not yet a genin, not yet an adult, and as his Clan Head, I have final say until then."

Inoichi sighs, scraping a hand against his face. He looks exhausted, Neji thinks, and wonders how much sleep he's getting. He remembers Inoichi and Shikaku both working themselves to exhaustion, back before. He was friendly with the two of them back then, but he's a child in their eyes, without the same shared history.

He doesn't know how Shikamaru can stand to have this renewed distance with his own father, whom he was closer with than Neji ever was with Hiashi-sama.

"Very well," Inoichi says, rising to his feet. Hiashi-sama stands as well. "I will need to speak to you again, then."

Neji inclines his head. "Of course."

"Thank you for your hospitality, Hiashi-san."

Once Inoichi is gone, Hiashi gestures for Neji to sit across from him, asking, "How is training going with Hinata?"

"She is much improved," Neji says carefully. He doesn't want to get between Hinata and Hiashi-sama or to give Hiashi-sama false hope that will make him even harder on Hinata when she doesn't live up to it. "She's getting over her fear of actually striking her opponent."

"If you can cure her of that, it'll be a miracle," Hiashi-sama says, quietly enough that Neji assumes he wasn't mean to hear it. Then, louder, he asks, "And your own training? Reports from the Academy are that you've improved even from where you were." His eyes narrow. "Particularly since your thwarting of the attempted massacre, there has been a marked improvement."

"I have been training with Nara Shikamaru," Neji says, because denying the improvement won't do any good, and it's better to preempt anything Hiashi-sama might say about Shikamaru. "And I have found myself increasingly motivated to become as strong as possible."

\--

"I will pay you to get me another drink," Tenten says, throwing a arm over the back of her chair. She's as close to relaxed as shinobi ever are nowadays, though her eyes still dart to the door when it opens. "A lot of money."

Neji doesn't need the money, but he gets up anyway, heading up to the bar to get her another beer and himself some water. He doesn't have a mission tomorrow, but he has a meeting with Hiashi-sama in the morning, and then another with Shikaku, and he'd rather not be hungover for either of those.

Tenten is playing with a knife when he gets back to the table, her not-quite-nervous habit, and she stabs it into the table next to where he sets down her beer.

"Izumi's going to be pissed at you," Neji reminds her, and she flips him off cheerfully. There's a rule against weapons in the furniture, only vaguely followed, as indicated by the pockmarks all over basically everything. His chair has a gouge down one entire leg of it.

"Izumi can suck my dick." She takes a long drink of beer. "Ugh, I want to get laid. Why is it so hard to find a willing, competent dick?"

"We are in the middle of a war," Neji says, because 'I don't want to hear about your sex life' never gets the response he wants. The usual response is for her to actually start describing her sex life.

Tenten rolls her eyes. "When are we ever in not in the middle of a war? Villages still need babies, don't they?"

"Are you planning on having a child, then?"

"Course not," Tenten says. "Why, you interested?"

\--

Neji wakes up with a gasp, fingers clenched around the edges of his futon, caught in the cognitive dissonance of his mind being more aroused than his current body has the physical capacity for.

Fuck.

He and Tenten only slept together a few times, more experiments than anything else, and he has no intention on having children to pass along his curse to, but Tenten was always a safe fantasy, if nothing else.

Except, fuck, she's a child in his class, here, a _child_ , and the Tenten he knew is gone, or will never exist, not exactly the same, and he's fucking exhausted, and he has literally the rest of his life like this.

Not that he had expected to survive the war, but he had never planned on them coming back this far, on him having to live this long in this lie. And it's only been a little while, and he already feels like he's drowning in his own loneliness.

He needs to talk to Shikamaru.

Except he shouldn't bother the Commander for something so trivial as his loneliness, especially not when the Commander has his own issues to deal with.

So Neji gets out of bed, putting his futon away before he heads outside to train. This early in the morning, the courtyards are clear; he begins a with the simple katas, the ones the Hyuuga teach the youngest of their children, before it's even known if their Byuakugan will emerge.

He moves on to the more complicated ones then, the more difficult ones, and to be honest he's not sure which ones he's supposed to know at this point, but he needs to keep moving, needs to do something to keep his mind off of his dream.

_Tenten's hand, tracing Neji's forehead_

Neji bites off a curse, forcing his breathing to stay steady, even as he walks through another set of katas. That life is gone. That life is gone. He lives here, now. 

He's going to learn how to live here if it kills him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic isn't going to be Neji/Tenten, just fyi, in case you're wondering why it's not tagged for that. I really like Neji+Tenten friendship, though.


	5. Chapter 5

 A blade slides, inch by inch, through a hole in his chest, smooth ( _serrated, catching on skin, on bone, tearing away at bloody flesh_ ) and steady, and he is caught ( _trapped_ ), arms forced wide, hands splayed uselessly open, unable to even twitch.

It has been hours ( _days years_ ) and he screams but all that's in his lungs is blood, bubbling out from his mouth and the hole in his chest--

Shikamaru wakes in the wrong body, too weak, limbs all in the wrong place, too many or not enough or just wrong, and he lurches over sideways, hand clamped over his mouth to keep in any noise that might come out.

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ , his chest hurts.

At this point it's as much phantom pain as real, the wound all but healed, but right now it aches like it's new.

There's no chance of him going back to sleep--he has no desire to be trapped back in that world Itachi may or may not have created; he's never been sure how much of it is sharingan-induced and how much is a creation by his own mind from the trauma.

Instead, he heads out of his room and into the main part of the house, hunched over on himself because he aches and nobody is around to see.

He should train, given that he's up and unobserved, but instead he sits down in front of the shogi board and starts setting it up.

There's this ache in him that goes beyond his chest, that's different from the normal aches and pains every shinobi develops before they hit twenty. He feels _old_ , older than he ever felt back in his time, surrounded by people who have never seen the world as something to fear, most of whom have not yet seen battle, much less war.

He's surrounded by children, and some part of him wants desperately for them to remain children for just a few years longer, but the selfish voice living in his chest wants them to be the adults he knew, as trapped by the horrors as he is. Neji is there, but Shikamaru is his commander, and he can't put this on Neji.

They have so much to do, so much to change, and he just didn't know how he's going to do it. He has no authority here, no power, and his body is this weak and fragile thing, slate when he needs it to be steel.

“Shikamaru?”

Shikamaru is breathing hard, he realizes, hunched over the shogi board with one hand clutching the shirt over his chest as though holding on will make the pain go away.

His father walks around to sit across the shogi board from him, and Shikamaru tries to make himself straighten out and relax, but everything is tangled up in his head, and he's being pulled apart, and he _aches_.

“You're not sleeping,” his father says.

Shikamaru swallows. “Nightmare.”

“You've had a lot of those.” His father watches him. “Your teachers say you're not sleeping in class anymore, and so I'm not sure when you are sleeping, now.”

He isn't, much. “I'm sure my teachers are relieved.”

“Not as much as you might think.” His father taps on the board. “Itachi Uchiha won't hurt you again.”

Itachi is the least of Shikamaru's worries right now. Not that he can tell his father that. “I know,” is all he says.

Nothing else is forthcoming for a while, during which Shikamaru struggles to keep from bowing over under the weight of his dreams, and then his father says, “In the field, shinobi take watches, so there is always somebody awake. There is no shame in needing someone to stand watch while you sleep, if that is something that would help you.”

Shikamaru's first thought is _no_ , and then _Neji_ , and then _I can't ask Neji to help without raising more questions that we can't answer_. But during the time when he's thinking that, his father says, “It doesn't need to be your mother or I."

"I," Shikamaru says slowly, "will think about it."

"Good." Shikaku stands, walking over to brush a hand over Shikamaru's hair. I'm proud of you."

Shikamaru shakes. 

\--

There's the flash of a blade, and Shikamaru twists, striking out once with his elbow, a second time with a foot to the knee, and Kiba is down, staring up at Shikamaru like he doesn't know who he is. 

"Well done," Iruka-sensei says. "Kiba, a little sharper with your movements, and watch that you don't open yourself up too much. Don't commit so much to a strike that you're vulnerable if it doesn't connect. Shikamaru, you're overextending; you're moving as though your limbs are longer than they are. Work on distance and being aware of exactly where your opponent is in relation to you."

Shikamaru nods. "Yes, sensei." He offers a hand to Kiba, who takes it, letting Shikamaru haul him up. Kiba's cheek is a little bruised, but he's grinning, laughter in his eyes. Akamaru runs up to KIba and nudges his knee, and Kiba crouches down to pick him up.

"Nice," Kiba says to him once he's straightened out, Akamaru in his arms. "You're not terrible when you're awake."

"Guess I have to sleep more, than." Stopping where Chouji and Ino are, Shikamaru flops down on the ground, putting his hands behind his head and staring up at the clouds. They're all so untrained, all of them, that this is little more than a joke, going through the motions for the sake of pretending.

He could kill all of them, and he's not even sure if it would be difficult.

Itachi Uchiha killed his entire family in a few hours.

Something needs to change, or no matter how many plans he makes with Neji, things won't go any better.

\--

Shikamaru wakes in the wrong body.

\--

He approaches Iruka-sensei after class and says, "Naruto is never going to be able to do the regular clone jutsu."

Iruka-sensei blinks at him then, looking a little disappointed, says, "There's no need to be cruel, Shikamaru. Naruto is working hard, harder than I've ever seen him work, and I'm sure he can accomplish what he puts his mind to.

"It's not that." Shikamaru leans on the desk behind him, crossing his arms across his chest. "He has too much chakra, and he'll never learn the control to sustain a clone jutsu. Get permission to teach him kage bushin no jutsu, and he'll be able to do that."

Iruka-sensei frowns at him, leaning forward behind his desk. "Shikamaru, how do you--"

"He can't read, either, other than the kanji he's learned here. I don't know if you're under the impression he has someone at home teaching him things, or helping him with his homework, or taking care of him, but he doesn't. As far as I can tell, Sandaime-sama stuck him in an apartment, gives him a little bit of cash every few weeks, and otherwise leaves him alone."

Iruka-sensei's mouth falls open, and while he's thinking of a response, Shikamaru turns and walks out of the room. He doesn't need to be here for Iruka-sensei's revelations. He's just guaranteeing Naruto learns what he needs to learn without Shikamaru needing to extend the effort to do it himself.

\--

Shikamaru wakes in the wrong body.

\--

Hinata wins a spar, and she stands over Ino with her hand clenched into a fist, a smile on her face.

Neji will be so proud, Shikamaru thinks, and lets Ino lean on him with a groan as she chats with Sakura and sneaks glances at Sasuke. That's a crush that, unfortunately, seems destined not to die out completely.

"When did Hyuuga Hinata get good?" Ino whines. "I mean she's pretty and all, but she's never been able to beat me before. And she didn't even use her Byakugan."

"Neji has been training her," Shikamaru says, and Ino looks at over at him.

Ino sucks on her teeth. "Why do you know so much about Hyuuga Neji, anyway? I thought you were done with him after he got you stabbed."

"The stabbing was on Itachi." And Shimura Danzo, but that's not a conversation he's going to have, not with them.

Ino rolls her eyes. "He's still a weirdo. And you're being weird, too, and I don't like it. We're going to be a team. You have to tell me things."

"Yeah, yeah." Shikamaru looks up at the sky. "You're so troublesome."

\--

Shikamaru wakes in the wrong body.

\--

"Our best option for avoiding a repeat of the invasion," Shikamaru says, striking out at Neji with a kunai, "is improving relations with Suna. Which might also solve the Gaara problem as well."

Neji parries, and Shikamaru jumps back; Neji follow, and then they're sparring between trees, using only hands and feet and kunai. "How do you propose doing that?" Neji asks between strikes. "We have no political power here, and for all intents and purposes, we're children, not even genin."

Leaping up to a tree, Shikamaru admits, "I'm still working on that part."

\--

Shikamaru wakes in the wrong body.

\--

He's being watched.

Root, he thinks, and there's someone on him every time he isn't in the Nara Compound, so he takes to only training with Neji there, the only place they can speak without risking being overheard.

One of them feels like Sai, and Shikamaru nearly catches him, once; he could, but it would reveal too much, and he doesn't want to show his hand.

\--

Shikamaru wakes in the wrong body.

\--

Shikamaru stands in front of a half-neglected shrine to Inari, and out from the shadows steps Shimura Danzo, uncovered eye fixed on him.

"Hello, Shikamaru."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a whole conversation with a friend about what shrines they would likely have in Konoha, and there's no way they didn't have a shrine to Inari, who's the kami of, among other things, rice, tea, and sake, and the protector of warriors, but at the same time, Inari is also the kami of kitsune and uses them as messengers, so I figure after the Kyuubi attack Konoha would have an uncomfortable relationship with Inari.
> 
> I figure Konoha also has at least one Hachiman shrine, with Hachiman being the kami of archery and war and warrior, but with Shikamaru trying to prevent a war (and without the same feelings about kitsune as most of Konoha at the moment) he would pick Inari over Hachiman.


	6. Chapter 6

 "I know why everyone hates me," Naruto says. "I looked up the Fourth Hokage, and it says he died on the day I was born, and so I must remind everyone of him dying, and that's why they hate me."

\--

"Shikamaru," Shimura Danzo says, and he sounds friendly and venerable and something approaching innocuous. Not like he's about to murder Shikamaru, which is a definite possibility at the moment.

Shikamaru bows slightly, keeping his eyes fixed on Danzo. "Danzo-sama."

"I've been watching you, my boy."

Shikamaru's skin crawls at the last words, and he think fondly of stabbing the man and letting him die here. Not that he would be able to, not in this body, and likely not even in his old, fully trained one. But it's a pleasant thought. All he says, though, is, "Oh?"

Danzo smiles, a little. "I like to keep an eye on our most promising Academy students, particularly ones who stand out. And you, Shikamaru, have certainly proven yourself, especially in stopping Uchiha Itachi."

Shikamaru can't tell if Danzo knows that Shikamaru knows or if his actions just drew his attention, and it's frustrating beyond belief, not being able to tell. It's the lack of a second damn visible eye, he thinks, and the fact that so much of Danzo's face is covered. It makes reading him all the harder.

Shikamaru swallows, then says, "I'm honored by your interest. I hope to be a successful shinobi, once I finish at the Academy."

"I have an opportunity for you, without you having to wait all those years. There is specialized, exclusive training, but only for the most promising students."

Fuck, Danzo isn't here to hurt him. He's here to _recruit_  him.

"I'm honored--"

Danzo holds up a hand, and Shikamaru closes his mouth. "You may think about it, my boy. But don't take too long, or my attention will move on. To the Hyuuga boy, perhaps." He walks past Shikamaru and away, brushing a hand against Shikamaru's shoulder as he goes, and Shikamaru has to fight to keep from stabbing him, or pulling away.

Fuck, he thinks when Danzo is gone. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

\--

He is allowed in to the Uchiha compound without question, the guard at the gate giving him a bow deeper than it should be, and nobody stops Shikamaru as he walks to the main building.

When he reaches the main door, Uchiha Mikoto calls, "Come in," and so Shikamaru enters, taking off his shoes and slipping on a pair of house slippers. He finds her in the kitchen, cleaning up.

“Hello,” Mikoto says, smiling at Shikamaru, wiping down the counter with a rag. “Are you here to see Sasuke?”

“What are your plans for Danzo Shimura?”

Mikoto's hand stops, and then she puts the rag down entirely, staring at Shikamaru with an expression that's disconcertingly like his father's, trying to work out a puzzle. “What's bringing this on?”

“The councilman just tried to recruit me for Root--threatened to force Neji to join him if I didn't go--and I'd rather work within whatever plan you have than get in its way.”

“Why not go to your father, then? I can't imagine you have, if you're here, but he surely wouldn't stand for someone threatening his son.”

“My father has…different political considerations than you do, and his anger is focused on Itachi for stabbing me rather than Danzo for giving the initial order. I'm assuming that you care more about the fact that your son was ordered to murder all of you.”

“I do,” Mikoto says, and she smiles, and Shikamaru thinks, _she's more dangerous than she pretends_. “We have plans in the works, and I will be happy to bring you into them, if you truly want to be involved.”

Shikamaru inclines his head. “Thank you.”

“It will be dangerous, though.”

Shikamaru doesn't respond, other than to lift one hand, and across the room her hand rises as well, led by the shadow connecting the two of them.

Mikoto's eyes widen, and she goes very still.

Shikamaru cuts the jutsu before she can do anything, especially because using a jutsu on another member of the village is considered bad form at best, and an attack at worst.

“Very impressive,” Mikoto says finally, lowering her hand to rest it on the counter. “I didn't feel that until I was already in your control, which I assume was your point. That's how you caught my son, is it not?”

Shikamaru nods, still a little wary. What he just did was a huge risk, and he's still not sure what she's thinking. “Yes. It's harder when someone is actively fighting against it, but yes.” He hesitates, then decides, fuck it, and asks, “How is Itachi?”

“I am well, thank you,” Itachi says as he steps into view in the other doorway, and Shikamaru has a kunai drawn before he stops to think about it. “My apologies, I didn't mean to startle you.”

“I wasn't expecting you to be out,” Shikamaru says, forcing his heartbeat to slow even as he doesn't take his eyes off of Itachi. Reluctantly, he puts away the kunai.

“Itachi was released to the clan,” Mikoto explains. “As we were the ones he was ordered to kill, we're trusted to stop him from trying again.”

“And if he does try again?”

“Itachi may be a genius, but I've been a jounin longer than he's been alive.” Mikoto smiles at her son, who's still standing in the doorway, hands carefully relaxed. “He knows better now.”

Itachi inclines his head. “Yes, mother.” His attention shifts to Shikamaru, but his eyes stay black. If he pulls his Sharingan, Shikamaru might actually stab him. “I have been suspended pending investigation.”

“Good.”

“I am in your debt,” Itachi says.

“Okay,” Shikamaru says, and that debt sits less uncomfortably than Mikoto's. Itachi does owe him, the fucker. “Then train me.”

Itachi shoots an alarmed look at his mother, and Shikamaru thinks, he's young, fuck, he's so young. “I can't--I'm suspended, and I _stabbed_ you.”

 _I remember_ , Shikamaru thinks grumpily, but it's Mikoto who says, “I will supervise, then.”

“ _Mother_ \--”

“I need to be strong enough to defeat you,” Shikamaru says, and they both look at him.

After a moment, Itachi says, in a tone like he's trying to break something to Shikamaru lightly, “You're still in the Academy.”

 _I stopped you once_ , Shikamaru thinks, but what he says is, “Then I guess we'd better get started.” He's still planning on training with Neji--he needs to, they need to work on those things they shouldn't know yet, and Neji is the only person here who knows who he is--but for basics and technique, getting that muscle memory back, someone with the Sharingan can be invaluable. And they _owe_ him.

“Well, I think that's a wonderful idea,” Mikoto says brightly, and of course she does, it's an idea that will put them in better standing with the Nara and thus the village, it'll be seen as a sign of forgiveness, but Shikamaru would rather the Uchiha be seen in good standing so they stop entertaining ideas of rebellion, so he doesn't mind that the Uchiha are getting something out of this, too.

“Would you like to stay for dinner?” Mikoto asks. “I'm sure you and Sasuke can finish your Academy work together.”

Shikamaru has no intention of actually doing most of his Academy homework, not that he ever did most of it. He used to skim it over, but he doesn't even do that now.

So he shakes his head and says, “No, thank you. I need to get home. My parents...worry.”

Itachi flinches.

\--

Dinner that night is quiet, his mother eating angrily in is father's direction but not explaining why, which probably means it's a sex thing, at least based on things Shikamaru learned while drinking with his father years ago.

Years later.

Whenever the fuck it counts as.

Either way, Shikamaru doesn't ask, because he doesn't want to know, and because they wouldn't tell him anyway, because he's a child here, and their child.

Finally, he can't stand the silence or the tension anymore, and says, "You didn't tell me Itachi Uchiha was released."

His mother startles alarmingly, dropping her chopsticks, and his father drops his head back to stare at the ceiling. He groans. "I was hoping you wouldn't find out about that."

"Shikaku--"

"He was released to the Uchiha beause they were making noise, and we're fairly certain they're not going to let him murder all of them, and beause I was overruled by the Hokage." His father looks him in the eye. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't want to worry you."

It was frankly more worrying when he didn't know where Itachi was, but that's at least in part that he knows far more about Itachi's situation than his father thinks he does. He can't say that, though, so he just shrugs. 

"How did you know?" His father asks. "He isn't permitted to leave the Uchiha compound."

Shikamaru scrapes a hand across his mouth, not really wanting to answer, but of all the secrets he's keeping, this is one of the less problemmatic ones to admit, and telling some things will keep them from questioning others. "I went to the Uchiha compound."

"Why?" his mother demands. "What reason could you have to go there?"

"I want them to train me." His mother opens her mouth, probably to argue, but he barrels on before she can interrupt. "The Sharingan allows for a degree of precision in recognizing tehnical problems in taijutsu that isn't possible with almost anything else."

"Did they agree?" his father asks.

Shikamaru nods.

"Who will be training you, then?"

"Itachi--"

"No," his mother shouts.

"Mother--"

"I forbid it."

"Dear--"

"I _forbid_  it, Shikaku. As you knew I would, Shikamaru, or you would have informed us beforehand, as you know you should before asking someone from another clan to train you. You are not yet a genin, and we are responsible for you, and I will not let the man who _stabbed_  you be the one to train you. I forbid it."

"It will be supervised," Shikamaru says.

His mother shakes her head. "I don't care. You are forbidden from training under that man."

The power of parents relies on the obedience of their children, Shikamaru thinks, and says nothing. There is no use in fighting his mother when she's like this, though he's not certain whether he's willing to disobey her this openly after she has given an order. 

He refuses to stay this weak and untrained, not when he has a choice in the matter. He needs the training, and Neji's body is nearly as untrained as his is. They can help each other, but Neji can't pull him up in the same way that outside training can.

And he can't train with his parents, not until he has a valid excuse for being so much more knowledgeable than he was just months earlier.

There's too much at stake here.

"You are to go to the hospital after you get out of school tomorrow," his father says, and it's clearly as much to change the subject as to let him know. "They want to confirm that you're healing well."

Shikamaru head outside after dinner, bypassing his normal stargazing spot of grass to enter the forest the clan owns. He doesn't go far, climbing a tree just inside the forest to sit on one of the larger branches, legs danging down. 

He is hampered by his perceived age and inexperience here, so much more so than he truly anticipated. The respect he had earned needs to be earned again, from the beginning, and it _burns,_ being ordered around like a child, forbidden from training as he wishes out of his mother's fear for his safety.

He is a shinobi. It's not a safe profession, and his parents know that. They should know that.

He was a commander of the Allied Shinobi Forces. He can train with Uchiha motherfucking Itachi without getting killed, even in this weak, half-useless body.

He doesn't want to go back into his house, back to that reminder of his weakness, so he heads through the forest around towards town, and it's a trick, not sparking the clan wards, but he's familiar enough with them that he manages not to set them off, stepping with quick feet and hoping nobody notices him.

He ends up at the gate to the Hyuuga compound, and when he says, "I'm here to see Neji," the guard sighs at him.

"Aren't you a little young to be wandering around at night?"

Shikamaru glances pointedly up at the darkening sky, then says, "Can I see Neji, or..."

"Whatever." The guard--who's fifteen, perhaps, forehead protector covering what must be the damn branch family seal--opens the gate, and Shikamaru slips in. Before the gate closes behind him, the guard says, "He's in the dojo when you go straight in."

"Thanks."

Shikamaru heads in to the building most directly in front of the gate, slipping off his shoes and putting on a pair of house slippers at the entrance. It feels a little odd, being unescorted in another clan's compound, but being here as a child eases the necessity for that. They're less afraid of him stealing clan secrets.

Perhaps they shouldn't be.

He finds Neji where the guard said he would be, dripping sweat as he walks through a kata Shikamaru recognizes as a Hyuuga one, one of the more advanced ones he's probably not supposed to know yet.

Shikamaru waits until he's done with the kata before clearing his throat, and Neji turns to look at him, pushing the loose strands of hair out of his face. "Commander." The word sounds like it sticks in Neji's throat, and he coughs, shoving the entire mass of sweaty hair over his shoulder.

Shikamaru takes off the house slippers and steps into the dojo, bowing before he slides the door shut behind him.

"Commander?"

"Councilman Shimura tried to recruit me into Root, and he threatened to recruit you if I don't go along with it."

Neji goes sheet white. "Mother _fucker_. He tried to _recruit_  you?" Neji shoves a hand through his hair. "I'm going to take his fucking eyes out. All of them. He doesn't get to _touch_  you."

Shikamaru blinks at him, a little surprised at that response. "I just wanted to warn you--"

Neji stalks towards him, and there's something wild in his eyes, and Shikamaru realizes he may have underestimated something, or missed something. "I am your guard, and that is not a duty I can do here, not as I should, not trapped here in this useless body, in this useless fucking house. I am supposed to be _with you_ , and I am trapped here. He doesn't get to touch you."

"Neji--"

"He has to become our top priority. We have to take him out first." Neji is wide-eyed and up close, pale and blotchy-pink and sweating, hair plastered to the side of his face, and he looks exhausted and frantic.

Shikamaru has the sudden thought that he's not the only one having nightmares.

"Neji." Shikamaru reaches out to touch Neji's cheek. His face is warm. "When was the last time you slept?"

"I think about the last time you did." Neji sags a little, pressing his cheek against Shikamaru's hand. "I'm going to murder the son of a bitch for threatening you."

"You're not--"

"The Hokage gave me an order, before we left, to protect you. That is my duty." He touches Shikamaru's chest, just over where he was stabbed. "I can't protect you from everything; I don't expect to. But I will rip Shimura Danzo's eyes out before I let him touch you."

"You don't need to--"

"Anything else happen today?"

"I asked Uchiha Itachi to train me."

Neji barks out a laugh, turning away. "Fuck. Of course. He fucking stabbed you, and you want--why is he even--"

"My mother forbid it." Shikamaru sits down on the floor, stretching his legs down in front of him. He's so fucking tired. "I just want to...sleep, for a few hours."

Neji takes a while to respond; he stays facing away from Shikamaru, shoulders high as he pulls his hair over his shoulders and braids it. The back of his gi is matted with sweat. 

"Did you consider this?" Neji asks finally. "Ending up here, ending up in this time? In all of your calculations, did you consider this?"

Shikamaru tilts his head up to stare at the ceiling. "I considered it, yes. I considered hundreds of possibilities. I considered if I ended up alone, or you did. I considered if we ended up in our real bodies where we could not have those bodies. But consideration doesn't mean much, when faced with the prospect of living here, like this. I want to sleep."

Neji doesn't respond, and eventually Shikamaru stands, stretching his arms over his head. He should head home and spend some hours lying down and not sleeping. He hasn't done enough to pass out from exhaustion, and he isn't quite antsy enough to go pacing around the house at all hours of the night.

"Stay here," Neji offers. He looks too small. "For the night, stay here. Let me keep watch."

"You look as though you haven't slept, either."

Neji's lips thin as he turns to face Shikamaru. "We can keep watch for each other."

\--

Shikamaru goes to sleep in the wrong body, but he goes to sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

Neji wakes up to chaos around the compound and Shikamaru pressed against his side. The commotion hasn't woken Shikamaru yet, but Neji has always been better at chakra sensing than him. Particularly now that they're in children's bodies; the Hyuuga teach it far younger than most clans, out of necessity.

For some, their eyes do not emerge, or they emerge late, and they must still be Hyuuga.

He slips off of the futon, pulling the blanket back over Shikamaru, and heads to the door, pulling it open just in time to see Hiashi-sama hurrying past.

Hiashi-sama stops, backtracking towards Neji; he looks frazzled, hair loose around his face as he says, "The Nara have reported the disappearance of their heir. The village is being called to alert."

For fuck's sake, did Shikamaru not tell anyone he was leaving?

Neji opens the door wider, stepping back to let Hiashi-sama see Shikamaru, still asleep, hair strewn across his face as he rolls over.

Hiashi-sama stares for a moment, and then his shoulders sag and he lets out a breath. "Why is the Nara heir sleeping in your bed?"

"Nightmares; I was helping him sleep. Keeping watch so he could." It was one of Neji's better rests since coming here, too, but he's not going to say that. "My apologies for not consulting before allowing him to stay the night."

He would never have needed to, back when he was viewed as an adult, and remembering that that is no longer the case is difficult, sometimes. 

Hiashi-sama examines him for a moment, then looks past to Shikamaru; finally, he asks, "Why is he having nightmares?"

"The stabbing by Uchiha Itachi, primarily, I think." Neji looks back at Shikamaru. "I wasn't able to reach him quickly enough to stop it from happening. He was--I thought he would die."

After a moment, Hiashi-sama nods. "I expect notification before this occurs in the future. Now I need to inform the Nara head that his son has been found."

He heads down the hallway, and Neji steps back into his room, sliding the door back shut. He can't imagine he would have gotten away with that previously, in the old time, but he also would never have tried. He had had no friends at this point of his life, only peripheral connections with his relatives, and there had been nobody he had truly been willing to risk anything for.  Hinata-sama, perhaps, but only in a pro forma way at that point, about duty rather than love.

Shikamaru is blinking at him from the futon, and when he shifts, Neji sees the kunai clasped in one hand. "Your uncle?"

"You didn't tell anyone you were leaving before you came here, Commander."

Shikamaru's head drops back so he's staring up at the ceiling. "Fuck. I didn't even think of it, not really. Did I get you in trouble?"

"Hiashi-sama said to tell him beforehand next time." Neji checks his clock. "We have time before we need to leave for school. Would you like to train?"

Shikamaru appears to be thinking about it, and then he sits up, pushing his hair out of his face. The kunai is still in his hand, but the grip on it is looser now. "I don't suppose there's anywhere we can train where we won't have eyes on us."

There is nowhere in the Hyuuga compound where it is impossible for there to be any eyes on you, given the nature of the Byakugan, but few people look when they don't need to. Privacy is prized, when it can be circumvented so easily.

"There are dojos where we won't be disturbed."

"Sure," Shikamaru says. "Let's go."

Neji leads Shikamaru through the building to the dojo he's thinking of, and it's so rarely used by anyone other than him that it's a genuinely surprise to slide open the door and see Lady Hinata in there, walking through a basic Hyuuga kata.

She startles visibly when the door opens, falling out of her stance and nearly falling over, her cheeks going pink in a way he suspects has more to do with embarassment than exertion.

"Apologies," Neji says, starting to bow back out of the dojo. "I didn't realize you were in here."

"No, no." Hinata waves her hands in front of her, sweat dripping down her temple. "No, please, come in. You don't need to--oh, Shikamaru."

Beside him, Shikamaru sighs, too quiet for Hinata to hear. "Hey, Hinata."

"Did you want to--" Hinata waves her hands again, looking at loss for what to do. Neji needs to train her into better composure, in a way less callous than Hiashi-sama's methods. "I can leave."

Training with Shikamaru would be easier without anyone to watch, but he also doesn't intend to kick Hinata-sama out of the dojo, particularly not when she's initiated training on her own.

"No," Shikamaru says, to Neji's surprise. "We'll train next to you, if you don't mind."

"Oh," Hinata-sama says. "Yes, of course."

Neji glances over at Shikamaru, who murmurs, "We need to practice age-appropriate skills."

Neji would honestly rather not, but it is a good point. They start with stretching, then katas, working on the other side of the dojo from Hinata-sama, and he can see her glancing over at them while working through her own katas.

She's getting stronger, more confident, but there is still a mile between her and him. There's a greater distance than there was originally, and he worries sometimes that she will be disheartened by that distance. But so far she seems to have just been inspired by it.

Eventually, she stops, brushing her hair back away from where it's fallen in her face. She bows to the two of them. "I will see you at school, Shikamaru, Neji-nii-san."

As soon as she's gone, Shikamaru turns to Neji, lowering his hands. Neji follows suit. "She distracts you," Shikamaru says.

"Not unduly."

"You barely look away from her when you're in the same room."

Neji shoves his hair out of his face, wishing he had taken the time to braid it. "I have a chance to fix things. I have a chance to right the wrongs that I made as a child--not only as a child, as a genin, up until Naruto beat the sense into me."

"We have other priorities--"

"She's my _cousin_."

"He was our _Hokage_. It was our _village_. We cannot allow ourselves to become consumed with what else we want to fix, what else we want to change, and allow Orochimaru or Danzo to destroy what we've sworn to protect. I--" Shikamaru breaks off, turning his head away. 

He takes a visible breath, then turns back towards Neji, expression blank. "I apologize. I didn't mean that."

"Commander--"

"You're right. We owe a responsibility beyond simply protection." Shikamaru sighs. "I just--I'm just afraid we're going to make things worse, in our effort to make them better. There are so many things I can't control here, so many variables, and I don't know what to do."

Neji doesn't know what to say to that, and after a moment of silence, Shikamaru straightens, bowing. "I need to get to school, and so do you. I'll see you later."

\--

Neji doesn’t see Shikamaru at the Academy; they are different classes, and he doesn’t seek him out. It’s not as though Neji doesn’t understand Shikamaru’s frustration, but both of them could use the time to cool down so nothing boils over past a point that they can return from.

They only have each other, to some degree, but they must also establish lives here. He still has his responsibilities as a Hyuuga, Shikamaru still has his responsibilities as a Nara, and they will be caught between those competing forces, but there is no point in creating additional stress there where it’s not necessary.

They have a chance to create peace here, but they must ensure that it is a proper peace.

Neji follows from a distance as Shikamaru heads to the hospital after the Academy—for a checkup, Neji assumes—and is satisfied with Shikamaru’s safety for the time being. Unlike when Shikamaru was in the hospital for the first time, it would be overly suspicious for Neji to overtly stand guard, and doing so clandestinely would be too difficult.

Instead, he heads to the tree where they first waited for Itachi, sitting on a high branch so he can watch those coming and going from the Uchiha compound. The wards are such that he can’t accurately see the movements within the compound without activating his Byakugan, which would be overly suspicious at the moment, but he can watch this much, at least.

Shikamaru seems to trust Uchiha Mikoto’s word that the coup will not take place, but Neji is far more skeptical. Clans do not change that quickly, and the Uchiha are notoriously stubborn.

When a familiar chakra appears below him, he looks down to see Shikaku standing under the tree, staring up at him. Shikaku signs _to-me_ in Standard Konoha Sign, and Neji drops to the ground before considering the fact that he likely should not know that sign this young.

He is too used to following orders, and Shikamaru’s and Shikaku’s orders in particular.

“Does your family know that you’re here?” Shikaku asks, slouching in front of Neji with his hands jammed in his pockets. He would look relaxed, if not for the line of his shoulders that is so like Shikamaru’s when he’s feigning disinterest.

Neji shakes his head. “My family does not care what I do with my time, so long as I bring honor to the clan.”

Shikaku squints at him, then asks, “Your father died, did he not?”

That old anger flares, but it is muted now, worn away like a stone in the river to smooth edges, something still weighty but blunt, soft. “Yes, sir.”

“And your mother?”

“In childbirth, delivering me.”

Shikaku’s eyes flick to Neji’s forehead, so quickly Neji would have missed it if he did not look for it in the eyes of every person he sees, and then he says, “Shikamaru shared your bed last night.”

Neji inclines his head.

“Did he sleep?”

“Until the morning.”

The affected disinterest slips away into something into, the entire weight of Shikaku’s considerable intelligence focused on Neji, and then it softens and he says, “You are welcome to stay the night at my home, any time that Shikamaru invites you, and you may refer your uncle to me if that is a problem.”

That is quite an invitation to extend, even to a child, and Neji says, “I thank you for offering me access to your clan home.”

Shikaku waves a dismissive hand and turns to go.

Chakra flickers in Neji’s periphery, old-familiar, and he jerks his gaze over to where Sai is hidden before he can help himself. Shikaku’s head goes up as well, lips thinning in what looks to be irritation.

“He’s probably here for me,” Neji offers in consolation, and that is a mistake, he thinks as soon as he does it, because they’re nowhere equals here, not two jounin, not two members of the Allied Shinobi Forces. Here they are a jounin and a child, not even a clan heir.

Shikaku gives him a sharp look as Sai’s chakra flare’s a little, a child’s inability to hide their emotions. “Why would somebody be tracking you?”

Fuck.

Neji hesitates a little too long, trying to come up with a plausible lie, and Shikaku’s expression sharpens even more. “Is somebody following my son?”

There is no good answer to that, nothing Neji can truthfully say that will get him out of this mess, and he doesn’t plan to lie to Shikaku, so after another too-long hesitation he says, “Itachi didn’t plan the murder of his entire clan on his own.”

“Are you saying,” Shikaku begins, then stops. “No,” he says finally. “You’re very carefully not accusing anybody. But you know who’s following you, or at least you think you do.”

“I have no proof of anything and would never accuse anybody in Konoha of anything without proof.” Neji really needs to get out of this conversation before he says something he can’t take back, so he bows and says, “If you’ll excuse me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is honestly not where I was planning on this chapter going. Why are all of my Neji chapters so hard.


	8. Chapter 8

After a long and troublesome checkup, Shikamaru gets cleared for regular training, with a warning to make sure he doesn’t overexert himself—he is a child here, he reminds himself, and can’t be trusted to take care of his own body—and then heads over to the Uchiha compound.

He is again let in without question, this time Itachi appearing out from the shadows to greet him before he can get too far into the compound. Shikamaru doesn’t stab him. He’s proud of his self control.

“Here for training?” Itachi asks, and he sounds oddly diffident. There is something wrong about it, that long-standing missing-nin a cowed child, but at the same time Shikamaru has to admit that’s better than him trying again to murder his entire clan, even under orders.

Shikamaru shakes his head in answer to the question. “I’ve been forbidden by my mother. I’d like to speak to your mother, if she’s available.”

Itachi nods, turning to lead Shikamaru into the nearest building. When Shikamaru nears him, he says, “You went missing last night.”

Does everyone know this? He doesn’t remember his parents being this vigilant last time he was a child. He shrugs, not wanting to explain himself to the person who gave him the nightmares in the first place.

“Your father came here to speak to me,” Itachi continues when Shikamaru doesn’t say anything. “He thought I might have been involved in your disappearance.”

Shikamaru hadn’t even thought of that, though he likely should have. There are too many habits he is no longer in, too many thought patterns he no longer has. “I’m sorry.”

Itachi stares at him for a moment, something blank and young on his face, and then he says, quietly, “You owe me no apology, particularly not for your parents’ concern.” His eyes flick to Shikamaru’s eyes, and Shikamaru looks away on instinct, just in case. But the visions never come, his nightmares not reigniting. “You are exuding chakra constantly. Am I that much of a threat, even here and now?”

“I’m expanding my chakra reserves,” Shikamaru says, and doesn’t look down.

Itachi doesn’t ask anything else about it, and he is silent until they are inside the building, Itachi bowing just a shade too deeply before he enters. “Tadaima,” he breathes, and doesn’t look at Shikamaru.

Mikoto is in the kitchen as she was the last time Shikamaru was here, and she smiles at the two of them as they walk in. “Itachi, thank you for escorting Shikamaru. Are you here to begin your training?”

“I have been forbidden by my mother to train under Itachi.” Mikoto’s eyes close, once, but that is her only outward reaction to what he says. “I have information to give you, to help you with your plan.”

“I see.” Mikoto wipes her hands dry on her apron before pulling it off and setting it on a nearby counter, and then she  _ shifts _ ; it is only her straightening, perhaps, or the inhalation of breath, but it looks like so much more than that, something fundamental changing in her countenance until she looks to be all shinobi. “Come with me, then.”

She leads him through the building to a room with seals all along the outside of it; when she touches one it sparks in a whisper of chakra, and then the door slides open, lights appearing inside the room. It is not until they are both in the room with the door slid shut again that she says, “We will not be overheard here, and Itachi will stand guard until we leave.”

“Do you trust him that much?”

Mikoto smiles faintly at him, sitting down on the tatami floor. Shikamaru doesn’t sit until she gestures for him to do so. “I know my son.” She brushes a piece of hair from her face. “What do you have for me?”

“Danzo has been stealing clan children.”

There is a moment of absolutely zero reaction, and then Mikoto moves, just the barest twitch as though she is reaching for a kunai. “You are certain?” she asks. “You are certain that he has stolen clan children?”

“Yamanaka Fuu and Aburame Torune have both followed me, despite being presumed dead, and there have been others, clan children who disappeared or died suspiciously after showing promise as children. Including your nephew.”

“Shisui killed himself.”

Shikamaru maintains eye contact just long enough to make clear his doubts, and then he looks away and says, “I see. My apologies.”

“Yes.” Mikoto lets out a breath that sounds shakier than before. “Yamanaka Fuu and Aburame Torune, you are certain? There cannot be a false accusation from us, we cannot—we will investigate this. Thank you for telling me, Shikamaru.”

He had considered not telling them at all, trying to deal with it on their own, but he’s increasingly coming to the realization that he simply can’t, that in these bodies and in these situations they are reliant on those around them. It is part of what makes this so difficult, because they need to seek help from people who cannot know what they know.

They may need to reconsider their principle of total secrecy as to their status, but not yet.

“May I ask,” Mikoto says, “where were you last night, if not in your home? If you were investigating this—”

“I wasn’t.”

Mikoto gives him a sharp look, and he realizes that he interrupted her as though they were both adult shinobi as opposed to him being a child Academy student and her being the wife of a clan head. Fucking time travel.

“What were you doing, then?”

This is not a secret that is worth keeping, not in the face of the rest of their secrets, so he says, “I haven’t been able to sleep, so Neji helped.”

“Why—ah.” She looks away, and he can see the shame on her face. “Though I do not expect you to trust us to do so, if you need help with that, we will do what we can to help you.”

Shikamaru would not sleep here if he had an army to watch over him, not with Uchiha Itachi and the living ghosts of his dozens of victims. But he inclines his head anyway and says, “Thank you.”

When she doesn’t seem to have anything else to say, he says, “I should return home.”

“Of course.” Mikoto stands, and she melts back into the housewife version of her. She must have been a master of infiltration, while she was still in the field, and he almost wants to ask her about it for the sole reason of to ask a master of her craft about her work. “I wouldn’t want your parents to worry.”

\--

Shikamaru wakes to the pounding of his heart, hours before dawn, and he makes it to the bathroom just in time to throw up everything in his stomach. It burns coming out, and he’s left spitting out bile before he flushes the toilet.

It wasn’t even the nightmare Itachi left him, this time; it was Asuma, from before the war, tangled up with the war itself, those things they left behind to try to change things.

He knows he didn’t desert his village, but it can’t help but feel that way, safe here in his clan home, no longer fighting as a shinobi. It feels like a betrayal, and shinobi abhor traitors.

It’s too early to go out into the rest of the compound without arousing suspicion, and he has done so too many times recently, so he puts his bed away and takes a seat on the center of the room. Eyes closed, hands still at his sides, he pulls up his chakra, sending it out seeking until he finds every nearby shadow in the room.

He breathes.

A scroll moves.

\--

Shikamaru throws himself back from the tree branch he’s perched on, just in time for three of Neji’s shukiren to slam into it, nearly breaking it off the trunk. Had he still been on it, he would have fallen.

He lands on another tree, then just back to another, nearly slipping as he feels a blip of chakra nearby. He has to stick himself to the tree with a burst of his own chakra, throwing a kunai at Neji just to keep him from attacking before Shikamaru can regain his balance.

They’re being watched, though the person is too far for him to easily identify. Root, he’s assuming, and probably not Sai, who he’s more familiar with than the rest.

Sai is young to be out, he thinks, but they sent Kakashi out young, and Itachi. Being on a war footing, or operating as though you are, leads you to using children for unconscionable things.

Neji jumps towards him, and Shikamaru drops down entirely, landing crouched on the forest floor. This is good chakra control practice and necessary for relearning and training these young bodies.

Neji drops down in front of him, signing,  _ observer _ .

Shikamaru signs back  _ confirmation-acknowledgment _ and then lunges forward, kunai out, because they’re fighting without ninjutsu and so he’s likely to lose a little less badly to a Hyuuga at close range.

They end up with Shikamaru pinned against a tree, Neji’s mouth close enough to his ear that he can say nearly noiselessly, “I can’t identify who’s watching us.”

“I assume it’s Root.”

“Fucker,” Neji mutters, but he sounds less angry at himself. “Where are the Uchiha on their plan?”

Still gathering evidence, because in the end they’ve been the police force for so long that it’s in their blood nearly as much as the Sharingan is. “Processing.” They’re determined to do this the right way, now that they’re not planning a bloody coup.

“I’m starting to lose patience.”

Shikamaru can’t blame him, but if they start getting too antsy, it could tip Danzo off. And Neji really isn’t the most subtle of people. “I want you to start looking into Orochimaru. Find out where he is now, what he’s doing, and connect that with what you remember from the intelligence reports we read from this time.”

Neji lets out a breath of what Shikamaru thinks is relief. “Yes, Commander.” He steps back, putting away the kunai he’s had pressed to Shikamaru’s throat. It’s one of the blunted ones, so they didn’t come home with more cuts than could be easily explained.

\--

Naruto still doesn’t seem to really understand how to read, and Shikamaru has been distracted enough that he’s not sure if that’s because Iruka-sensei hasn’t been helping him or because Naruto is just that far behind, but either way, it’s not ideal.

He knows that Naruto managed to get through graduation and even the chunnin exams with the level of literacy he ended up with, but if Shikamaru can make things even a little easier for him, he’ll try.

And, honestly, he’s a little concerned about Danzo having him killed, and then Naruto will have lost his sole champion, at least for the moment.

So after class he slouches against Naruto’s desk and asks, “Hey, you want to study at my place again?”

Naruto’s eyes light up, and then he sags a little as he asks, “Are your sure your parents would be okay with that? Or, I mean, I could leave before dinner, if they don’t want--”

“If my parents didn’t want you to come over, they would have said so.”

Naruto only hesitates for another second before perking up again, gathering up his papers in a crumpled mess that he shoves in a bag that’s falling apart. Shikamaru really wants to figure out how to fix that too, how to fix the fact that Naruto apparently has not only no access to the Yondaime’s finances but also has no adult who is responsible for caring for him.

There is no other orphan in the village who is treated that way, and shinobi children least of all. When parents sacrifice themselves for their village, they do so knowing their children will be cared for, and the villagers keep that promise.

Except when they fear that child to the point of irrationality.

“Have you ever been to the Inari shrine?” Shikamaru asks before he can think better of it.

Naruto blinks at him. “What’s that?”

“It’s one of the biggest shrines in the village, but people stopped taking care of it so much after the Kyuubi attack because Inari is associated with foxes.”

“That’s stupid.” Naruto grins at him. “Let’s go see it. If the village doesn’t like it, well, we should just show them wrong. The shrine never hurt anyone.”

“No,” Shikamaru says, “it didn’t.”

They head over to the shrine, and Naruto makes a face when he sees how rundown the torii looks outside it. “This is it?” he asks, bowing cursorily before heading inside. “It looks like such a dump.”

Shikamaru gives a seeper bow before following Naruto in. “They used to have D-rank missions to take care of the shrine, like they do for the rest of them, but they mostly stopped doing that.”

Naruto is staring up at the shrine, but at Shikamaru’s words he turns a bright grin on him. “Wow, Shikamaru, you know a lot about this. When I’m Hokage, I’ll make them go back to doing that. They shouldn’t leave the shrine alone just because they’re scared of foxes. That’s really stupid.” He turns back around towards the shrine itself, then stumbles backward, arm rising up to point at the shadows. “You, creepy old man, what are you doing?”

Fuck. Shikamaru steps up next to Naruto as Danzo appears from the shadows, and Shikamaru wants so badly to step between then, to shield Naruto from Danzo’s gaze, but that would be too suspicious, here and now.

Danzo gives them a grandfatherly smile that makes Shikamaru really want to stab him. “Shikamaru, my boy, I’m so happy to see you.”

“Who is he?” Naruto asks in a stage whisper. 

“This is Councilor Shimura Danzo,” Shikamaru says, without taking his eyes off of him.

“Councilor?” Naruo’s screws up his face. “Like those people jii-chan always complains about?”

“Exactly like those people.”

“Huh.” Naruto looks at Danzo. “You’re really old.”

Danzo’s lips tighten, is scars pulling. But then he clearly relaxes again, asking, “Have you considered what I offered you?”

“Huh?” Naruto asks loudly. “Did he offer you food or something? Why wouldn’t you take food?”

“No,” Shikamaru says, and he keeps his eyes on Danzo when he says it. “No, I’m happy where I am.”

“Then I suppose I’ll have to talk to your Hyuuga friend.”

“Hinata?” Naruto asks, louder.

“No,” Shikamaru says again. “Neji is fine where he is, too.”

“I see.” Danzo’s visible eye narrows. “Perhaps I’ll talk to one of the younger Hyuugas. Hinata, or young Hanabi.”

Shikamaru will fucking murder him if he touches a hair on Hinata or Hanabi’s head. Neji can wait in line; Danzo will not get those girls. There are weapons of control used against girls more readily than they’re used against boys, girls even that young.

But young Shikamaru wouldn’t know that. Young Shikamaru knew nothing about what old men do to young girls. So young Shikamaru says, “I think Hinata-chan and Hanabi-chan are better training with their family.” He grabs Naruto’s wrist. “C’mon, Naruto. We have to go study.”

\--

Shikamaru walks Naruto home, partly to help him carry home all the food his mom foisted on him, partly to see where Naruto lives. He knows where Naruto lived in the future, but he has no idea if it’s the same place as during his Academy years.

It isn’t, it turns out; Naruto’s Academy years apartment is a genuine shithole, a 1K with what looks like ten years’ worth of water damage. It’s surprisingly neat, if not necessarily clean, though from looking around Shikamaru has a feeling that has as much to do with Naruto’s lack of belongings as any true impulse to straighten up on Naruto’s part.

There’s very little in the tiny fridge, just a carton of milk and what looks like a rotten half-cabbage. The food Shikamaru’s mom gave him fills up most of it.

“Thanks,” Naruto says, dropping his bag on the floor. He looks around. “You want anything? I got ramen, and I think I got tea somewhere.”

Shikamaru shakes his head. “No, thank you.” He glances around the apartment again. “You’re not a genin yet. Where do you get money from?”

Naruto flops down on his couch, then sits up, fidgeting like he can’t sit still. “The old man gives me money every month, and he gave me this apartment. He said I can stay here through when I’m a genin, maybe even through when I make chuunin.” He chews on the edge of his thumbnail. “The old man said that maybe when I make genin or chuunin I can even get a 1LDK.”

Naruto deserves a clan home, not a fucking 1LDK in the shittiest shinobi-serving apartment there is. But there’s not a lot Shikamaru can do about that, so he just says. “Let me know if you want to study together again. I think your hiragana’s getting better.”

Naruto grins at him. “Thanks.”

Shikamaru heads out after that, too miserable to stay longer. It’s such a fucking tragedy, how the village treats Naruto. They gave him a burden and then punish him for carrying it, the fucking cowards that they are. Too scared of the demon they think he is.

Fuckers, the lot of them.

Shikamaru loves his village, but sometimes he hates the people in it.

Around him is a flood of chakra, civilians heading home or shinobi starting late shifts, a period of transition. Organized chaos wrapped up in a miasma of noise and movement. It puts Shikamaru on edge, that part of him that barely left a warzone still far too on edge for a vibrant, thriving village.

In front of him looms the Hokage’s residence, and he stops in the street to stare up at it. The Hokage is no doubt there now, likely dining with his family or preparing for bed in his luxurious residence, while the Yondaime’s orphan son languishes in squalor.

“Fuck you,” Shikamaru says.

Nobody answers.

He takes a deep breath, spreading his chakra out around him. Behind him, something moves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Japanese apartment sizes are a little weird. A 1K is basically an apartment where there's just a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. A 1LDK has a combined living room, dining room, and kitchen (so it's quite a bit bigger) as well as a bedroom.


	9. Chapter 9

Access to the library is far more controlled than Neji remembers. Back when he was a jounin, working closely with T&I, he had access to all the files he needed, particularly during the last couple weeks of planning. Some particularly sensitive files had required some negotiation between Shikaku and Ibiki, but there had been nothing in the public shinobi library that he had not been able to access.

Without a forehead protector, that is all different.

Perhaps an eighth of the books are accessible to Academy Students, and most of those are either copies of Academy textbooks or supplemental historical or academic information. There are a dozen books on the correct cleaning of kunai but a suspicious lack of books about the Yondaime. 

Neji wonders whether the Sandaime removed them or the Council did. He’s never been quite sure who the pin the majority of that blame on.

There are files he knows are about Orochimaru, but they’re far beyond his current access, and what he really needs is up-to-date intel files, the kind kept in the main administrative building.

Stealth is not his strong suit; Hyuuga style is about planting your feet in the ground and destroying your opponents as they come at you. He thinks the Commander would be able to get in and access what they need, but he’s tasked Neji with finding out information on Orochimaru, which means he expects Neji to figure out how to do it.

His first stop is to the mission desk.

There’s a mess of people there, because he manages to pick one of the mission report delivery times--something he hasn’t had to worry about in a while, because their mission rate decreased significantly once the war ramped up--so he hangs back in one corner to watch and wait for the initial crowd to die down.

Iruka-sensei is working the mission desk, and Neji has never had him as a teacher, but he knows his reputation.

Namely, he knows the reputation that Iruka-sensei was kind to Naruto despite his parents being killed by the kyuubi.

So when the room empties out, he heads over to Iruka-sensei, who smiles up at him. “Hello, Hyuuga-san,” he says. “How can I help you?”

“Hello,” Neji says, hoping he sounds convincingly like a child. “I was wondering if I could access some mission reports. I thought it would be useful to study them, to get a better understanding of how the tactics we learn are applied in the field.

“You’re a weird fucking kid,” the man next to Iruka-sensei says. He looks familiar, but Neji doesn’t have the Sharingan’s photographic memory, and he can’t place the man.

Iruka hits his shoulder. “You’re already here on punishment, Hayate; don’t make it worse by swearing at Academy students.”

Hayate Gekko. He was murdered by Orochimaru during that disastrous Chuunin exam.

Hayate laughs. “He one of yours?”

“Does that matter?” Iruka-sensei looks back at Neji with a smile. Neji tries to smile, though it feels awkward on his face. “I should be able to get you copies of some mission reports. Are there any that you were thinking of?”

“Some Hyuuga mission reports,” Neji says, because it’s what he would ask for if this was what he was actually planning on using them for. “And I was hoping for some from Jiraiya-dono, as he’s known for being a taijutsu expert.”

“I see,” Iruka-sensei says. He taps twice on the table. “The Hyuuga mission reports shouldn’t be too difficult. Jiraiya-dono, though...his mission reports are usually highly sensitive.”

“Just give him some of them,” Hayate says. “Who’s the kid going to share it with? And besides, you know Jiraiya encrypts anything that’s really sensitive.”

Iruka-sensei considers what Hayate is saying, but eventually he nods. “I’ll give you some of them,” he says. “But you need to promise not to show them to anybody and to return them to me within a week. And Neji? If you give them to anyone, I can guarantee, you will never become a shinobi.”

Neji nods. “Yes, sensei.”

Iruka looks around, then says, “Hayate, go get him some mission reports. I don’t trust you enough to leave you alone here.”

“Fair,” Hayate says, then coughs.

\--

The documents Hayate gives him aren’t the most recent, but they aren’t as old as they should be, considering the sensitive nature of Jiraiya’s work. Neji considers reporting this to someone--Shikaku, perhaps--but he needs these documents at the moment more than he needs to worry about hardening the operational security of their mission desk.

He knows the key to Jiraiya’s encryption, but it’s slow going, parsing through the documents and recording the information in a usable manner. It’s made worse by the fact that Jiraiya has a habit of going on long rambling accounts of the women he sees along the way, in great detail.

Neji has never wanted to have sex with any woman as much as Jiraiya apparently wants to have sex with every woman.

He needs to read those descriptions, though, because rumors and sightings of Orochimaru are encrypted as tales of black-haired beauties. Rumors are are large-busted; sightings are small-chested.

There are a lot of large-busted black-haired women in Jiraiya’s reports and few small-chested ones.

Most of the rumors have Orochimaru in Kusa, though starting about a year ago Neji begins seeing rumors of Otogakure, Orochimaru’s network of labs masquerading as a village.

The problem is that, while Neji knows where the village borders are--more than Jiraiya seems to know, at least as of the last document Neji has decoded--he doesn’t know where the lab entrances are. He’s not sure if it’s something that’s been lost with time or whether he never knew in the first place. He has a feeling it’s the latter; he was a genin during most of his involvement in the hunt for Orochimaru, too low level to be informed of much beyond the most necessary intelligence, and once promoted his focus was on Akatsuki almost without exception.

Knowing the final locations of the labs may not be helpful now anyway, given how newly settled the village is. He has no doubt things changed in the interim years.

He’s trying to plot Orochimaru’s movements on a map when there’s a knock on the door; he barely manages the get everything sealed away in a scroll before the door slides open, revealing Natsu, Hanabi’s caretaker, standing at the doorway. Neji scrambles to his feet, bowing slightly; he’s not sure if something is wrong with Hanabi-sama, though he’s unsure why she would be coming to him if there was.

“Hiashi-sama has requested your presence,” she says.

“Has he indicated why?”

Natsu shakes her head. “He has not. Though, he was with Nara Shikaku-sama when he made the request.”

Shikamaru. Something must be wrong with Shikamaru.

“Where?”

Natsu starts, and Neji realizes he used a tone he hasn’t used since he was a jounin, a tone more appropriate for a fellow shinobi than a young maid. “The formal receiving hall,” she murmurs.

Neji takes off running, just barely managing not to knock Natsu over as she hastily steps out of the way. Shikamaru--if something happened to Shikamaru--

It takes more restraint than he thought he had to slow himself down to a walk before he reaches the formal receiving hall, to open the door without slamming it, to bow to Hiashi-sama and Shikaku and say, “You requested my presence, Hiashi-sama.”

Hiashi-sama gestures a hand towards Shikaku, who asks, “Is Shikamaru with you?”

Is Shikamaru--

“I have not seen Shikamaru in a couple days,” Neji says, and he thinks his voice sounds calm enough. “Why, if I may ask.”

Shikaku’s eyes narrow, and then he says, “Last night, Uzumaki Naruto had dinner with our family, and then Shikamaru walked him. He did not come home. I assumed he had spent the night with you again. But if you’re telling me that you haven’t seen him in days…”

Danzo. Motherfucker.

Neji’s hands are deadly still, his mind perfectly clear.

“Hyuuga-san, may I speak to your nephew alone for a moment? It is a private matter regarding my son’s health.”

Hiashi-sama hesitates, but then he says, “Very well.”

Nobody speaks until Hiashi-sama is gone, the door closed behind him, and then Shikaku snaps, “Shinobi, report.”

“Shikamaru has likely been abducted by Councilor Shimura Danzo,” Neji says before he can think about it, because he has been obeying Nara commanders for too long to stop now. “If Shikamaru’s body has not been found yet, Danzo likely intends to force Shikamaru to join Root, presumably after interrogation.”

Shikaku’s shadow holds Neji in place, a shadowed hand settling around the base of Neji’s throat. “You aren’t Hyuuga Neji. Who are you?”

“I am Hyuuga Neji, first son to the second son of the Hyuuga clan.” Shikaku takes a step towards Neji, forcing Neji to take a step forward as well. Neji doesn’t struggle. “I am son to Hyuuga Hizashi, nephew to Hyuuga Hiashi, cousin to Hyuuga Hinata and Hyuuga Hanabi. I am loyal to Konohagakure.”

“You have the reflexes of a trained shinobi. You have the  _ responses  _ of a trained shinobi.”

Neji clenches his teeth, then forces himself to relax his jaw, to relax his shoulders. He needs to present as as harmless as possible, something he’s never been particularly skilled at. “Do you doubt my loyalty?”

Shikaku stares Neji in the eye, Neji in this too-small body, and then he says, “I don’t doubt your loyalty to my son.” His shadow retreats. Neji doesn’t move. “Why do you think Shimura Danzo has Shikamaru?”

“Danzo was responsible for Uchiha Itachi attempting to massacre his clan.”

“Itachi--”

“Is a child, a pacifist who loves his family and loves his brother above all. Given the proper threat to Sasuke, Itachi would kill anyone, but he wouldn’t do it on his own. After Shikamaru stopped the massacre, Danzo became interested in him and attempted to recruit him into Root, as he recruited numerous clan children, including Aburame Tatsuma and Torune and Yamanaka Fuu.”

“Fuu is dead.”

“Then a dead shinobi has been following Neji and I. He has dozens of others, some still children. Shikamaru refused him, and he threatened to recruit me. Shikamaru has been helping the Uchiha build a case against him.”

Shikaku’s jaw hardens, but he doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Neji waits. He’s learned patience the hard way, and now isn’t the time to forget it. 

Finally, Shikaku asks, “Why the Uchiha, rather than coming to me?”

“Because they are the village’s police force, and they have a vested interest in stopping the man who ordered their heir to murder all of them, and because they owe him. And because your focus is on the shinobi who stabbed and nearly killed your son.”

“None of this makes any sense.”

“Have you found a better explanation for why an otherwise loyal tried to murder his entire clan?”

“The death of Uchiha Shisui--”

“Was caused by Danzo.” Neji presses his hands to his side to keep from doing something rash like grabbing a weapon he shouldn’t have. “Commander, please, he has Shikamaru.”

Shikaku hesitates, clearly torn, then mutters, “Fuck. Okay, kid, stay here. I’m not done with you.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No.” Shikaku heads towards the door. “I’m serious; stay here.”

Neji nods and stands there and waits until Shikaku is gone before taking off back towards his room. He has a Commander to save.

\--

“I need to speak with Uchiha Mikoto.”

The Uchiha gate guard gives Neji an unimpressed look. “Aren’t you an Academy student? What business do you have with our Head’s wife?”

“Tell her it’s about Shimura Danzo and Nara Shikamaru.”

The gate guard goes absolutely rigid, and then he shushins away without another word. 

Neji waits, hand on his kunai, until the gate swings open. To his surprise, instead of the gate guard, it’s Itachi, sword strapped to his side.

“If you pull your sharingan on me, I’m going to kill you.”

Itachi tilts his head to the side, oddly fey. “We have a common enemy, here.”

Neji fought in as part of the Allied Shinobi Forces; he can fight beside Uchiha Itachi. But he will never trust him.

“You have something to tell my mother, then? Come on.”

Neji doesn’t thank him for access to the Uchiha compound. He doesn’t know if he would thank another Uchiha, but he can’t bring himself to thank Itachi for anything.

He’s never been on these compound grounds before, not as a child and not once it was the site of the worst massacre Konoha had seen since the kyuubi attack. As a child, it had been Sasuke’s home, and after Sasuke’s defection it had been locked down. He knows some Academy students had dared each other to sneak in, but Neji had never had friends to dare him to do that, and he would have feared disgracing his family too much to do it even if he had.

It is eerily full of life.

Sasuke is sitting at the table near the kitchen, doing his Academy homework while his mother cooks, and he looks up when Neji comes in. “What’re you doing here?” he asks. “Aniki, what’s going on?”

Itachi makes eye contact with his mother, who says, “Sasuke, can you give us a few minutes? And no listening in at the door.”

“Can aniki come train with me?”

“Why don’t you go practice your shuriken,” Itachi says, ruffling Sasuke’s hair. “I need to stay here with Mom.”

Sasuke pouts at Itachi, but he obligingly jumps up, wraps Itachi in a hug, and scampers off.

Neji watches impatiently for the door to slide shut behind Sasuke before saying, “Danzo took Shikamaru, likely last night. I know about your investigation, but this is past the point of investigation. Commander Nara was made aware approximately eight minutes ago and is likely mobilizing.” He looks Itachi in the face. “You owe him.”

“We all owe him,” Mikoto says. “The clan will act.”

“I can provide information on access points to Root’s headquarters,” Itachi says.

“You owe him more than that,” Neji says.

“I am forbidden from leaving the clan compound without permission from the village leadership.” Itachi gives him a wry smile. “And I have a feeling they’re busy at the moment.”

“Enough.” Mikoto takes off her apron, setting it aside on the table. “Itachi, get your father and then gather the clan council.” Itachi shushins away, and Mikoto turns her attention entirely to Neji. “Shikamaru didn’t tell me you were involved.”

“Historically,” Neji says, “our clans are not friends. It was simpler for everyone if I stayed out of the way. But we’re past that point now.”

“We are.”

The Uchiha are gathered within a couple minutes, and after Neji presents what happened to all of them, they take out a map of Konoha for Itachi to brief them on the best places to breach Root headquarters. There are four accessible entrances to the headquarters, more than would usually be used for operational security so there’s not a suspicious number of people coming into and out of the same place.

“Are we really planning an assault based on the words of an Academy student?” one of the elders demands when Itachi pauses to take a break.

“What would you have us do?” Mikoto asks. “He’s taken a clan child.”

“Not one of our children.”

“We are all children of Konoha,” Mikoto replies, sounding far calmer than Neji thinks he could manage at the moment. Shikamaru has been taken, and they’re wasting time. 

The elder rises to his feet, hands clenched into fists. “We are not treated as such. We are ostracized and blamed for the rampaging of a monstrous demon. Who are they to demand anything of us?”

Before anyone can muster a response--and Neji has no idea what that response would be, because he’s no diplomat, especially not here shaking with fury--there’s a knock on the door, and a voice says, “Nara Shikaku is at the gate.”

Fugaku’s eyes go to Mikoto, and then he orders, “Send him in.”

There’s silence while they wait for Shikaku; they must not want to be caught arguing in front of Shikaku, especially when they risk it sounding treasonous. He’s let into the room by another Uchiha that Neji doesn’t recognize, who bows on his way out and doesn’t make eye contact with anyone.

Shikaku glances around the room, his lips pressing tight when he sees Neji. The disapproval sits uncomfortably on Neji, like a shirt he’s just now noticing he’s outgrown, but he won’t apologize for the actions he’s taking to save Shikamaru, not until he’s certain Shikamaru is safe.

He has his orders, from an authority that supercedes Shikaku’s.

“I don’t have time to fuck around,” Shikaku says. “Shikamaru is gone, and we can’t locate him anywhere in the village. Is there a chance that he has actually been taken by Councilor Shimura?”

Fugaku flicks his gaze at Itachi, who says, “Danzo has had someone following Shikamaru since he got out of the hospital.”

At that, Shikaku’s eyes settle on Neji again, and there’s a shift in the way he holds himself, just a little. The disapproval changes to something else. But then he looks back at Itachi to ask, “Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

Shikaku nods. “You’re not taking this action unilaterally, then. Gather your forces, whoever is best suited for hostage rescue. I will be briefing the ANBU within fifteen minutes.”

“They are within the ANBU,” Itachi says quietly.

“Can you identify who in the ANBU can be trusted?”

“Enough for a siege.” Itachi glances over at his mother. “But it will have to be quiet.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Shikaku says, sounding irritated, and then he shushins away.

Fugaku stands, and all eyes in the room go to him. He looks tired, that bone-deep tiredness that comes from being worn down for months and months. It’s a look Neji knows better than he would like. “Gather the forces. We will prove that we are in line with the village. The rest of the clan is to stay indoors, and the gates are to be locked to all but clan, the Nara, and the Hokage until my order.” He looks at Mikoto. “Keep Sasuke inside.”

\--

“You’re not coming with us.”

Neji jams his hands in his pockets and looks up to meet Shikaku’s eye, hating how  _ much  _ he needs to look up to do so. “You don’t have time to argue with me.”

“You’re right, I don’t.” Shikaku makes an ANBU hand signal, one Neji doesn’t know, and then there’s a body behind him, a hand closed around his throat. It’s gentle, but he knows better than to struggle, because whoever is holding him could easily cut off his air or snap his neck before he could break free. “You’ll be kept under guard until this is finished, and I hope after that I can let you go with an apology to you and your family.”

Around him, white feathers fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said I was going to finish the next chapter of my Naruto fic like three weeks ago, but that was a lie, so now you have this instead.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I forgot to warn for this, sorry)
> 
> The beginning of this is torture-y, so if you want to skip that and not really miss any plot, jump to "They aren't here yet, are they?"

Shikamaru wakes to almost more pain than this body can handle.

His left collarbone is broken, his right anklebone fractured, and if his ribs aren't cracked he'll eat a shuriken. His lip is split, though it's stopped bleeding, and he can hardly pry his eyes open, so sticky his eyelashes are with half-dried blood.

Head wounds bleed a lot.

By a miracle, he doesn't seem to have a concussion, though the pain is enough to make him have to swallow compulsively to keep from vomiting. But if his ribs aren't already fucked, throwing up will certainly finish that for him.

And he refuses to vomit in front of Danzo, who's standing in front of him, watching him with that grandfatherly look of placid disappointment that makes Shikamaru want to stab him.

"Hurts, doesn't it?" Danzo asks. "But it doesn't need to be this way, my boy."

"Great." Shikamaru swallows around a dry throat. "Great sales pitch."

"You're insolent. You'll learn better." Danzo takes a step towards him, and Shikamaru just manages not to flinch. "You've spent time with the Uchihas recently. Why?"

"Well, Itachi stabbed me, so I thought I'd spend some more time with him."

"Are they investigating me?"

Shikamaru sighs, which is a mistake, given his ribs. "I'm only eight."

"You're nine," Danzo snaps.

Fuck. Well, at least that's an answer to that. "Sasuke's mother asked me not to treat Sasuke poorly because of what his brother did to me, so sometimes I do my Academy homework with him."

Danzo backhands him, casually, and he feels the cut in his lip split open, dribbling blood down his chin. His mouth tastes like blood and his face hurts like a motherfucker.

Wincing, Shikamaru swallows.

Danzo steps back to his spot next to one of his Root members, one Shikamaru doesn't recognize on sight or chakra. "That was for lying to me the first time."

I lied to you the second time, Shikamaru thinks, and says nothing.

"Now. There is no reason for this to be so difficult. What I'm offering you is an honor, a chance to serve your village beyond what you would ever be able to do as an ordinary shinobi."

"Sounds troublesome," Shikamaru says, and this time the Aburame next to him breaks his left wrist. Shikamaru screams, and lets himself. "How do you see this ending? It's not a though my parents will just let their heir disappear into the night."

"They aren't here yet, are they?" Danzo says. "Your family isn't coming for you." He gestures towards the shinobi around him. "Their families never came for them. This village loses children, just as every shinobi village does, and we train more, because we can't afford not to. But children like you, wasting your potential behind your lack of ambition, you weaken our village. I am doing what is necessary to make our village strong."

Danzo steps towards him, and Shikamaru thinks, now, and with a twist of his unbroken wrist, he snaps Danzo's neck.

\--

"You realize what stopping him would mean, don't you?"

"I didn't take you for squeamish," Tsunade sneers, taking a swig of sake straight from the bottle.

Shikamaru runs a finger along the edge of his cup but doesn't drink. "It's not every day that it's suggested I kill a village Council member. Maybe give me a moment to get over my inherent repulsion at that idea."

"You have a moment, but you don't get much more than that. We can't risk the instability now, but--"

"But if I see a chance, whenever we end up, I'll take it.”

Tsunade shakes her head, a little wobbly, but her voice is steady when she says, “Do the calculation at the time. I trust you to make that decision in situ better than I can here and now.”

“Ma’am?”

Tsunade sets the bottle down on the table, a touch too hard. “You’re smart, Shikamaru, and you know it, so don’t play humble. We, all of us, are relying on you to make the right decisions, so I need you to understand this: you will have to make all of these decisions on your own, with no point of authority above you. I am sending you on this because I trust you to make these decisions. But you also need to trust yourself to make them, or you will doubt yourself, and you will make mistakes that you can’t afford to make. Trust yourself, and if you don’t trust yourself, trust that I know what I’m doing in choosing you.”

It takes Shikamaru a moment, and then he downs his sake in one go, making a face as it burns all the way down his throat. “I trust you, Hokage-sama.”

“Good.” Tsunade hiccups. “Now get me more sake.”

\--

There is a hand around Shikamaru’s throat, but it’s not squeezing. He’s not sure if it’s confusion because of lack of orders or something else, but he knows he doesn’t have much time, if any at all, to keep them from killing him.

So he says, “Ino misses you.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Fuu says. “Torune?”

Beyond Fuu, Torune is kneeling beside Danzo’s body, one hand on his throat with a green glow around it. After a moment, Torune says, “He’s dead.”

“What do we--”

“Kill him,” Torune says, drawing himself up as he stands, rinkaichū swelling out to settle on his skin. “He killed Danzo. He needs to die.”

“Danzo ordered us to keep him alive,” another Root member says.

“His death supersedes those orders.”

“His orders stand.”

The hand pulls away from Shikamaru’s throat, and he sags, unable to keep himself upright in the face of his chakra drain. The movement sends a spike of pain through his ribs and collarbone, and he tries to keep from stiffening too quickly, because that sure as hell won’t help with the pain.

None of his injuries are immediately life-threatening, but if he doesn’t get treatment for some of them relatively quickly there’s a definite risk of permanent damage. He’s particularly concerned about his collarbone, because he has no way to brace it, and he’s not sure how much damage he’ll do to it by moving it. He’s--

\--

“Where do you think you’re going to end up?” Naruto asks, squinting at a line at the edge of the seal. He makes a face but doesn’t change it.

“Hopefully we end up where you try to send us.”

Naruto laughs. “When have things ever gone the way I intended?” He frowns at a new line in the seal, which isn’t particularly reassuring, but Shikamaru will be the first person to admit that Naruto understands what this is supposed to look like better than he does. It’s not his area of focus. “I want you to try to help Sasuke, if you can.”

Shikamaru scrubs at his face. “You know I can’t guarantee that.”

“I know.” Naruto gives him a bright grin. “I know you probably can’t help him, unless you end up  _ way _ further back than we’re aiming for, but...if you can.”

“Please don’t try to send us further back just so we can help Sasuke.”

“I--” Naruto chews on his lip, which makes Shikamaru think he had been considering that, at least a little. “No, I know,” he says finally. “The village is more important than anything else. But I just can’t help but think, with everything we know now about Danzo and Itachi and Root, maybe--maybe things could have gone differently. With Sasuke.”

Shikamaru doesn’t have the same attachment to Sasuke that Naruto does--he doesn’t think anyone has the same attachment to Sasuke that Naruto does--but intellectually he can admit that it would make their life a little bit easier to have to have one fewer ex-Konoha shinobi as an enemy. Still, “I can’t promise anything. We can’t--”

\--

“He’s waking up.”

Shikamaru tries to sit up, except he can’t, he’s already sitting up, he can’t move, his body won’t move, he’s being held by enemy shinobi and they have his weapons, he has no weapons, he has no chakra, and there’s a body on the floor near him.

Status check.

Broken collarbone, broken wrist, fractured anklebone, cracked ribs. Chakra depletion.

And his body feels wrong, too small, skin tight against his bones, it’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong he can’t

Neji should be here he’s on a mission with Neji where’s Neji is Neji the body is Neji dead has their mission failed he needs to find Neji he needs to he needs to

Shikamaru lurches out of the chair he’s in, blind with pain, and hands catch him, enemy hands, and his collarbone  _ screams _ , and he lashes out with his too-small uninjured arm, not long enough, his elbow in the wrong place, and hands catch him, hold him, hold him down in the chair.

“Mother _ fucker _ ,” a voice breathes in his ear, “this kid doesn’t fight like an Academy student.”

“He just killed Danzo,” another voice says, “and you’re expecting him to fight like an Academy student?”

Danzo.

Danzo he killed Danzo the body is Danzo who took him tried to recruit him tortured him he’s in the past this is Root he’s in the past in Root headquarters he killed Danzo Danzo is dead

Shikamaru stops fighting.

The hands ease on him, the pain eases, and he tries and tries to breathe.

Which is when the door bursts open and the room swarms with ANBU.

It’s an ANBU that leans over him, two fingers pressed to his throat, and Shikamaru knows that chakra.

“Kakashi,” he breathes, and the ANBU stiffens. “Not their fault.”

The fingers press deeper into his neck, for just a second. “Can you walk?”

Shikamaru thinks about his ankle, then says, “Probably.” He swallows around the pain. “Collarbone, wrist, ankle, ribs.” He blinks, and there’s someone next to him, Itachi is next to him, and he recoils, Kakashi stabilizing him so he doesn’t fall off the chair. “No.”

“He won’t hurt you,” Kakashi says, in a voice that sounds like it’s aiming for reassuring but misses by a large enough factor that Shikamaru’s pretty sure he hasn’t reassured anyone in a long time.

“He stabbed me once.”

“Danzo is dead.” Itachi helps Shikamaru to his feet, and when Shikamaru’s leg does out from under him, he levers Shikamaru up in his arms, gentler than Shikamaru thought he was capable of. It hurts like a son of a bitch, but still less than Shikamaru had expected.

It still steals his breath from him, leaving him panting and struggling not to press his face into Itachi’s chest in an effort to hide away from the pain. This body was not prepared for this level of injury, particularly not left untreated. This body is weak and untrained, just a step above useless.

There is noise around him, a dozen people speaking at once, but when he tries to look, Itachi turns him away from it, saying, “You don’t need to see this.”

“It’s not their fault,” Shikamaru says again. “It’s not their fault.”

“I know.”

“It’s not--” The cut on his lip opens up again, and there’s a well of blood in his mouth. He swallows and regrets it.

“I know,” Itachi repeats. “Which one killed Danzo?” Shikamaru laughs, and gasps, and his ribs feel like they’re breaking. He’s going to throw up, the pain is so bad, and then they’re outside and someone is pressing green-glowing hands to him and Itachi is saying, “Danzo is dead.”

His father’s face is above his, and he’s being laid on a stretcher, and his father is asking, “How injured is he?”

“Collarbone,” Shikamaru begins to report, at the same time Itachi says, “His collarbone--”

His father’s eyes dart to Itachi, and then they land back on Shikamaru, and he says, “Shikamaru, report.”

There’s something wrong with that, something wrong with his father’s voice, but Shikamaru can’t--he can’t-- “Collarbone broken, wrist broken, anklebone fractured, ribs cracked--”

“Broken,” the healer says. “At least three of them.”

His dad doesn’t look away from Shikamaru’s face. “Head trauma?”

“No,” Shikamaru says, then, “maybe.”

“Shimura Danzo?”

“Me.”

“How?”

“Modification of Shadow-Neck Binding Jutsu to allow for rapid movement without corresponding movement on my part though a minimal use of chakra. I broke his neck when he got in range.”

“Why?”

Shikamaru swallows, his throat clicking. The exhaustion is starting to hit him now, a result of the healing and the fact that he’s finally horizontal, but he’s not done with his report. He needs to--

“Why?” his father repeats.

“I don’t have the chakra stores necessary to perform the original jutsu.”

His father looks away. “Put him to sleep and get him to the hospital.”

Shikamaru blinks and doesn’t open his eyes again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END OF THE DANZO ARC


End file.
